ABSTRACT
The fact that England did not experience a regime of absolute and centralized monarchy in modern times, and also the fact that social change there assumed the shape of economic upheavals that seemed to result from the encounter between so many individual initiatives and enterprises, probably explain to a great extent why interest in utilitarian thought is largely an English phenomenon. Apart from Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the main figures of utilitarianism are Adam Smith, Ricardo, James Mill, Alfred Marshall, Henry Sidgwick, and Herbert Spencer. The concept of the ‘invisible hand’ in Adam Smith’s work states in a shorthand way a type of general theorem of order and social progress: the pursuit of particular interests works to the advantage of the general interest. Smith comes back to the proof contained in the Fable of the Bees by Mandeville, a book published in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, but which was extremely popular for many decades. Rousseau refers to it and so does Marx. The central theorem of the Fable reads: ‘Private vices make public virtue.’ Similarly, Smith attempts to show that the juxtaposition of selfish behaviours generates unintentional altruism. By bringing down his prices to attract his rival’s customers, a butcher thinks he serves his own interest. In fact, he is only serving the consumer’s interest since his rival will do the same. With Smith and Ricardo, the movement of utilitarian thought results in the creation of a new discipline: economic theory. That economics is anchored in the utilitarian tradition is historically indisputable, even if modern economics is sometimes presented as being freed from its utilitarian origin through the simple
fact that it tends to substitute the notion of preference for the traditional notion of interest. But the utilitarian paradigm was not limited to the analysis of economic phenomena only. Thus, for Spencer, the endless development of co-operation entails a process of continuous differentiation in societies. With Spencer, the interplay of individual interests results in an evolutionist theory of societies. This process of growing differentiation suggests, according to Spencer, an analogy between the development of the embryo and the development of society. But this is only an analogy. The cause of this differentiation lies in the interplay of individual interests.
