Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it alongside earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historical approaches to the study of the central idea of utilitarianism, the chapters provide a rich set of insights into a founding component of ethics and modern political and economic thought, as well as political and economic practice. In doing so, the chapters examine the multiple dimensions of utilitarianism and the contested interpretations of this standard for judgment in morality and public policy. 
The chapters are written in celebration of the career of Professor Fredrick Rosen. They follow his work by concentrating on Bentham and the two Mills, and by the subtleties and sophistication of their understanding of one of the most alluring but elusive ideas of modern times. The volume will be of interest not only to admirers of Rosen but to academics and postgraduate students in disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, the history of political thought, legal theory and legal history.
 

Georgios Varouxakis is professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London and codirector of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. He is the author of Liberty Abroad. Mark Philp is professor of history and politics at the University of Warwick and an emeritus fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He is the author of Political Conduct and Reforming Political Ideas in Britain.
 

1. Introduction: Happiness, Utility and the Republic of Letters 1
Mark Philp and Georgios Varouxakis
2. Happiness and Interests in Politics: A Late-Enlightenment Debate 20
Emmanuelle de Champs
3. Jeremy Bentham and the Spanish Constitution of 1812 40
Philip Schofield
4. Scepticism and Epicureanism: From David Hume to J. S. Mill 59
James Moore
5. Bentham on ‘Hume’s Virtues’ 81
José L. Tasset
6. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Mill on Pleasure and Virtue 98
Roger Crisp
7. ‘The First Article to Look to is Power’: Bentham, Happiness and the Capability Approach 118
Michael Quinn, Bentham Project UCL
8. Jeremy Bentham and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms 143
Manuel Escamilla-Castillo
9. James Mill on Happiness 161
Antis Loizides
10. Bentham, Mill, Stoicism and Higher Pleasures 184
Jonathan Riley
11. Individualist and Totalizing Ethical Thinking in Mill’s Utilitarianism 207
John Charvet
12. Mill and Democracy: Taking William Buckley Seriously 225
Alan Ryan
13. John Stuart Mill and the Jewish Question: Broadening the Utilitarian Maximand 246
Samuel Hollander
14. The Failure of Planned Happiness: The Rise and Fall of British Home Colonies 269
Barbara Arneil
15. Making Better Sense of Ideal Utilitarianism 289
David Weinstein
Index 313