ABSTRACT
Nothing was more important to Bentham than that we should take our utilitarianism pure, simple, undiluted, without a trace of sentimentality or embarrassment; nothing was more important to the French philosophes than to avoid all-out utilitarianism, despite their constant and enthusiastic recourse to the notions of interest, self-love, and usefulness. Bentham for all intents and purposes would expurgate "virtue" from our moral vocabulary; the consistent refusal of the philosophes to do the same was self-conscious, adamant, and central to their shared intellectual project, that of reconciling interest with virtue, inclination with duty. Rousseau was also the man who offered a mirror image of Pascal from within the philosophy of the Enlightenment. According to Saint-Lambert self-love is necessarily an expansive emotion, one that renders the distinction between selfishness and selflessness meaningless. To the philosophes Rousseau was the author who transformed the comfortable conceptual universe they inhabited into the worst of all possible intellectual worlds.
