ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke provided a clear statement of the value of traditional sources of legitimation for governmental authority and, in general, his ideas provide an important critique of the assumptions and conclusions of liberalism. The arguments for laissez faire individualism that James Mill and later Herbert Spencer were to make appeared in their economic form in Jeremy Bentham’s Defense of Usury, but these ideas did not constitute an essential part of his utilitarianism. The rise to importance of the arguments for laissez faire effectively countered Jeremy Bentham’s arguments for powerful government and diluted his immediate influence on public policy. The alternative statements of the position of governmental authority provided by Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Burke were responses to a wide range of social, economic, political, and philosophical developments that, by the close of the eighteenth century, demanded philosophical framing.
