ABSTRACT
The reduction of economic and political life to the interplay of basically egoistic individuals was a central theme of the nineteenth-century Utilitarians. Bentham argued that nature had placed all men under the sway of two sovereign masters, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. By studying these individual motivations, one would understand how the social system worked. A satisfactory system was one where the structure of incentives (to obtain pleasure and avoid pain) brought about the maximum possible net sum of individual pleasure, counting each person as one. Bentham’s ‘felicific calculus’ offered in theory a rudimentary way of measuring this goal.
