Barrell concludes by arguing that the utilitarians’ conscription into an ahistorical Enlightenment is doubly misconceived, first, because they opposed only the crudest forms of historical enquiry, and, second, because the eighteenth-century Enlightenments were neither systematically ahistorical nor neatly superseded by Romantic, organic, and historicist ideas. If, therefore, these new historical perspectives were both products and unruly offshoots of Enlightenment, then the utilitarians’ intellectual history assumes a more fluid shape. This new shape, Barrell suggests, may force us to rethink the utilitarians’ place within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century; the history of historical writing; and the history of philosophy.

J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

J. S. Mill in the 1830s and early 1840s, Barrell argues, thought extensively about the practical problems of historical enquiry. His progressive theory of historiography, sketched in the article on Jules Michelet, rejected presentism and the resort to ‘everyday experience’. This rejection was bolstered by his reception of German Historismus, Romanticism, and ‘Continental’ philosophy, all of which set out to de-familiarise and imaginatively reconstruct the past. The best modern historians, J. S. Mill argued, were more attentive than their eighteenth-century predecessors to the past’s animating uniqueness, and it is significant that Hume, Gibbon, and other eighteenth-century luminaries barely featured in his account. At the same time, his defence of general principles provided continuities with Scottish philosophical history and the utilitarian tradition in which he was raised. Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French Revolution, while innocent of presentism, was ultimately conjectural and uncritical, whereas Grote’s History of Greece combined criticism with philosophical insight, placing it somewhere between the second and third stages of historical enquiry.

James Mill’s dogmatic rhetoric in his essay ‘On Government’ (1820) and his rejection in the History of British India (1817) of ocular and narrowly empirical methods, when seen against the febrile political backdrop of the early 1830s, was a gift to utilitarianism’s Whig, Tory, and Romantic opponents. However, his defence in A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) of Bentham’s jurisprudence and moral philosophy, when placed in the context of his other late writings, suggests a different intention. In both his historical and political writings, James Mill pursued the ‘real business of philosophy’ in which general principles illuminated social phenomena and laid bare the emptiness of Whig empiricism. Only the ‘speculative man’ could appreciate the past’s distinctness by separating general from special causes, and Mill’s indebtedness to Francis Bacon and David Hume is evident in this respect. His attractions to Benthamite utilitarianism and Scottish philosophical history were variously deepened and underpinned by his readings of Bacon and Hume, and those readings, Barrell suggests, may have been encouraged by Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

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This chapter examines contemporary responses to utilitarianism as a political tradition, and, contrary to accepted wisdom, argues that Bentham’s theory of utility was circumstantially and thus historically relative. It asks why Bentham has been perceived as both an ahistorical and an antihistorical thinker, despite his engagement with the ‘Enlightened’ historicisms of the eighteenth century: with Montesquieu, Barrington, Kames, and others. While he denied that history possessed an independent value that could determine or even effectively structure politics, we should not mistake these arguments for an unwillingness to contemplate politics historically, or to make occasionally significant concessions to time and place. Bentham’s point, rather, was that historical truths were categorically distinct from philosophical ones, and that sciences historiques observed the past while sciences philosophiques appraised it. The chapter also addresses Bentham’s overlooked work as a ‘historiographer’ who performed recognisably historical tasks, including the examination of evidence and the passing of historical judgements

George Grote developed aspects of Bentham’s and James Mill’s philosophy into an endorsement of German Historismus, the fruits of which can be seen in his landmark History of Greece (1846–1856). While his historiography is associated more with James Mill than Bentham, Barrell argues that his conception of philosophical history more closely resembled Bentham’s science historique than James’s scale of civilisations, and that his attraction to German Historismus can be explained, at least partly, by his Benthamite logic; like Bentham, he stressed the past’s particularity and distinctness, in pursuit of which he embraced the hermeneutic, philological, and critical strands of Historismus. Greece’s ‘peculiarity’ provided opportunities for reflection without resorting to a vacuous presentism. His examination in the history of ‘democratical sentiment’ and ‘constitutional morality’ illustrated modern society’s comparative selfishness and the difficulty of reproducing those sentiments ex nihilo. The chapter ends by considering the ways in which J. S. Mill drew on these arguments to reconcile modern individuality with extensive civic duties.