Word: benthamism
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...Rear-Guard Action. After Bentham, Marx-and the 19th century was marked by the long period of conservative decline. Through it, the conservatives maintained their rear-guard action: Coleridge, brilliantly insisting that society was losing its soul because it was fascinated by means, forgetful of ends; ("Men, I think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.") Sir Walter Scott, defending Scotland's ancient laws against Bentham's passion for reform, warning that local tradition could not be erased without damage, writing the Waverley Novels as tracts for conservatism...
...Tragic Marriage. In Hawthorne's industrial New England. Bentham was triumphant, although never wholly so. The ostensible home of U.S. conservatism moved to the rural South, there to meet its worst defeat. Calhoun had spoken in principle for all minorities, but in practice he spoke for the slaveholding interest. In dealing with the tragic union of U.S. conservatism and slavery, Russeil Kirk, a bold writer, does not firmly grasp his nettle. He sidles away, with a glancing blow at the abolitionist innovators. He had a better case than he makes...
Beer & Sherry. The one thing London U. lacks is glamor. Its biggest tourist attraction is the fully dressed skeleton of Jeremy Bentham that still glowers from its glass case in the men's staff common room at University College. London students are likely to drink beer instead of sherry, and less than half of them live at their colleges. The rest live at home or in lodging houses about town...
There are other examples, based on far less apocryphal stories, of the process doing some good. Einstein's skeptical attitude towards Newton's is one; the geometricians' distrust of Euclid is another. Bentham refused to accept the "natural laws, natural rights," theories of previous economists; Susan B. Anthony skeptically disagreed with the idea that only men could vote. None of these people claimed to be right or wrong in the absolutist sense of Father Feeney; they simply questioned the status quo. And in every case their questioning has helped mankind along. As long as man keeps on scratching his head...
Brilliantly in Greek. Some people maintain that Manchester was the only place where Harold Laski could have been born. Manchester had nursed the industrial revolution and produced the "Manchester school" of laissez-faire liberals e.g., John Bright, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden. State Planner Harold Laski, the argument went, was History's revenge on the city of Manchester...