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Benthamite Utopias: The Industrial City, Utilitarianism, and the Catholic Reaction
From: Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Tristram Hunt |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Victorian city exhibited not only physical decrepitude but, more significantly, moral collapse. The industrial city had dissolved the traditional social bonds that had previously cemented society together. A godly Britain where the spirit of noblesse oblige, virtue and, above all, duty obligated the individual in a myriad of social relations had descended into an abyss of atomistic individualism--religion and custom had been replaced by atheism and immorality. Critics located the intellectual roots of the woeful 'condition of England' in the materialism of the rational Enlightenment. The philosophy which embodied that tradition was utilitarianism; the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. In this lecture, originally delivered at the "Locating the Victorians" conference in July 2001, Tristram Hunt reveals how the industrial cities of the early nineteenth century became caricatured as Benthamite utopias where individualism and materialism governed all conduct. And what terrified the Victorian public was that precisely those conditions had ushered in the horrors of the French Revolution. |
Tristram Hunt discusses the existence of Benthamite utopias |
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