ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham's social outlook was that of the utilitarians, who held that the greatest happiness of the greatest number must determine judgment of public issues. Bentham's reliance on reason, and the implementation of reason by a "neutral" vocabulary of human motives, seems alien and remote to the time. Karl Marx, like Bentham, was heavily involved in exposing what he considered to be fallacies in the use of rhetoric. But, unlike Bentham, Marx was not concerned with creating a science of rhetoric, but in carrying out a program of social action. Thus, while the Marxists, like all who communicate, have a rhetoric and use all the arts of persuasion, they argue that their rhetoric is grounded in a dialectic. The materialistic critique of Spirit is "the analysis of it as a rhetorical device, and the dialectical symmetry behind the Marxist terms of analysis seems to involve the approach to generic and individual motives through the specific".
