Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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to rule. For Carlyle the natural rulers were ‘the unclassed Aristocracy by nature…

“who derive their patent of nobility direct from Almighty God”.’

Similarly, selection by merit, rather than patronage, market competition (as

distinct from competitive examination), or co-operative endeavour, ought to be

the supporting principle of recruitment. Merit of course entered into all systems

of recruitment: merit adjudged by the patron, by the impersonal market, or the

acceptance of one’s fellow workers. But in the professional ideal merit meant

ability and diligence in one’s chosen field of expertise, and could be judged only

by other professional experts in the same field. The principal technique for such

selection was the examination. The cult of the examination amongst the

Benthamites is proverbial. Bentham himself regarded it as the perfect device for

‘maximizing aptitude’ and ‘minimizing expense’, and it was the cornerstone of

his followers’ educational endeavours from the Lancastrian schools of 1808 to the

Society of Arts Examination Board of 1854.

It was no less a cult amongst their

rivals: Thomas Arnold laid a new emphasis on examinations at Rugby, where in

addition he replaced free entry for local boys by scholarship examinations, while

his son Matthew devoted his professional career to examining elementary

schoolchildren.

Examinations inevitably preoccupied the new professional

institutes of the nineteenth century, and were absorbed into the framework of the

State by Macaulay’s and Trevelyan and Northcote’s reforms of the Indian and

home civil services.

Examinations were a method of ensuring that the candidate was capable of

performing the function for which he was selected. For the ideal society was a

functional one in which trained and qualified experts provided efficiently and

disinterestedly the services necessary to keep it functioning. The professions

were bound to justify the privileges—incorporation, self-government, control of

entry, and ultimately a legal monopoly of the occupation—which they increasingly

claimed from the State, by the service which they provided for the community.

They naturally extended the demand for justification by service to the rest of

society. The Ricardians, for example, justified the capitalist by his service of

managing industry and initiating the cycle of economic activity, and condemned

the landlord for giving nothing in return for his unearned rent. Malthus, on the

other hand, justified the landowner by his service of unproductive consumption

which initiated the activities of the other classes. John Gray, the professional

J.Mill, Government, p. 7; Carlyle, ‘Shooting Niagara, and After?’, Macmillan’s

Magazine, 1867, XVI. 319.

Cf. Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870 (1960), pp. 79–84,

149–50; F.E.Foden, ‘A History of Technical Examinations in England to 1918’, Ph.D.

dissertation, Leicester University, 1961, pp. 3–4, 10–14, 19–20.

T.W.Bamford, Thomas Arnold (1960), chap, xii; M.Arnold, Reports on Elementary

Schools (1910).

214 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

lecturer, hoped that all men would justify themselves in the society of the future

by their labour, manual or mental:

In the old world, men are respected in proportion as they are enabled by

the possession of wealth to command the labour of others…. In the new,

we hope to secure to all men the value of their services to society in

whatever way they may be given; to respect men in proportion to their

utility in promoting in any shape or way, the happiness of our species; and

to attach value, not to pieces of metal, but to every thing which tends to

improve the condition of the human race, physically, morally, or

intellectually.

Gray’s definition of service in terms of human happiness and improvement was

characteristic of the professional ideal. It followed naturally from the concern

with function, which could be defined as the increasingly efficient satisfaction of

human needs. The Benthamite ‘principle of utility’, of ‘the greatest happiness of

the greatest number’, obviously fits the same model:

the only rational foundation of government…is, expediency—the general

benefit of the community. It is the duty of a government to do whatever is

conducive to the welfare of the governed.

More remarkably, the anti-Benthamite professional thinkers used identical

language. For Coleridge the ‘outward object of virtue’ was ‘the greatest producible

sum of happiness of all men’, and his ‘positive ends of the State’ were:

1. To make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual:

2. To secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his own

condition or that of his children:

3. The development of those faculties which are essential to his

humanity, that is, to his rational and moral being.

The concern of professional men with happiness, progress and efficiency was

not entirely altruistic. It was the function of the nineteenth century, Sir George

Young has said, ‘to disengage the disinterested intelligence, to release it from the

entanglements of party and sect,…and to set it operating over the whole range of

human life and circumstance.’

In so far as it did this institutionally, it was the

disinterested intelligence of professional men—doctors, lawyers, civil servants,

Millerson, op. cit., pp. 120–9; Wyn Griffith, The British Civil Service, 1854–

1954 (1954), pp. 12–16; E.W.Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service,

1780– 1939 (1941), pp. 118–23.

J.Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (1825), p. 3.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 215

engineers, scientists, social workers, teachers and professional thinkers— which

it brought to bear upon its problems. These men were not necessarily superior,

morally and intellectually, to their fellows in other classes, but they had a

professional interest in disinterestedness and intelligence. It was their interest to

‘deliver the goods’ which they purveyed: expert service and the objective

solution of society’s problems, whether disease, legislation, administration,

material construction, the nature of matter, social misery, education, or social,

economic and political theory.

They also had an interest in educating society to demand, and pay for,

disinterested, intelligent service, and to differentiate themselves from quacks and

charlatans. Hence their interest in what Sir George Young again called

‘moralizing society’.

They moralized society at both the theoretical and

practical levels. At the theoretical level, professional men moralized the ideals of

the other classes by transforming them from mere apologetics for self-interest

into moral theories of society. Thus the three main streams of social thought in

nineteenth-century England may be regarded as the rival attempts by three

streams of professional thinkers to sublimate the economic interests of the other

three classes into morally and intellectually coherent social philosophies, by

infusing into them large doses of the professional ideal, and coaxing, goading or

shaming their members into living up to them. In each case they were at first

successful, but increasingly the professional ideal became uppermost in the minds

of the professional thinkers, and increasingly alienated their adopted class.

The first, the radical or Utilitarian, stream flowed from the Benthamites and

Ricardians, via John Stuart Mill and his followers, down to the Fabians. With the

exception of Bentham himself, the Lord Chancellor manqué, Ricardo, a

stockbroker who would now claim professional status, and Beatrice Webb, the

rentier, they were nearly all professional men: lawyers, doctors, civil servants,

academics, journalists, professional authors, and so on. At first this stream

intertwined with the entrepreneurial ideal, since in the early nineteenth century

professional expertise and selection by merit linked arms with capital and

competition in opposition to the ‘idle’ property and ‘corrupt’ patronage of the

aristocratic ideal. Yet by the time we reach the second generation the two ideals

are beginning to diverge. John Stuart Mill developed doubts about the

competitive system:

I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who

think that the normal state of human beings is struggling to get on; that the

N.W.Senior, Oxford Lectures, 1847–48, in Industrial Efficiency and Social Economy

(ed. S.L.Levy, 1929), II, 302; Robbins, op. cit., p. 45.

Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825), p. 39; Second Lay Sermon (1839), p. 414.

G.M.Young, Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (1960).

Ibid., p. 4.

216 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which

form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human

kind, are anything but disagreeable symptoms of the phases of industrial

progress.

He began to advocate the proletarian alternative of producer co-operation, for

the moral revolution that would accompany it: the healing of the standing

feud between capital and labour; the transformation of human life, from a

conflict of classes struggling for opposite interests to a friendly rivalry in

pursuit of a good common to all; the elevation of the dignity of labour, a

new sense of security and independence in the labouring class, and the

conversion of each human being’s daily occupation into a school of the

social sympathies and the practical intelligence.

He revived the anti-landlord death duties and unearned increment taxation of his

father and Bentham, but found small response in the capitalist middle class for

his land reform campaign or for the collectivist social reforms which he called ‘a

qualified Socialism’.

And other Utilitarians, Morley, Thorold Rogers and

J.S.Nicholson to the one side, Henry Sedgwick, A.V.Dicey and J.F.Stephen to

the other, divided themselves between advanced Liberalism and paternal

Toryism, both equally anathema to the capitalist middle class.

When we come to the Fabians, the intellectual grandchildren of the

Benthamites,

the divergence is complete. In them, ‘the greatest happiness of the

greatest number’ has completely shed all connection with capitalism and

individual competition, and has become the slogan of a purely professional

socialist society, in which the capitalist will become ‘a public official with a gold

band round his hat, a secure income, and a pension’, and the wage-earning class

will be abolished, and replaced by salaried, professionalized workers.

A similar divergence took place in the second stream, between the aristocratic

ideal and its professional apologists. This, the organicist or Idealist stream,

flowed from Coleridge and Southey, John Wilson and the Blackwood’s

revivalists of the aristocratic ideal, via the Christian Socialists and the Oxford

Idealists, T.H.Green, D.G.Ritchie and Arnold Toynbee, down to the East End

‘settlers’ and the Charity Organization Society. Blackwood’s saw its role as one

J.S.Mill, Principles, pp. 453, 475.

J.Bentham, Supply without Burthen, or Escheat vice Taxation, in Bentham’s Economic

Writings (ed. W.Stark, 1952), I. 279f.; James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (1821),

pp. 202–3; J.S.Mill, Explanatory Programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association

(1870), in Dissertations and Discussions (1875), IV. 239f., and Autobiography, pp. 161,

195–8, 210; cf. Beer, op. cit., II. 237–45.

Cf. A.V.Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England (1952 ed.), pp. 161, 165; J.Roach,

‘Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia’, Cambridge Hist.J., 1957, XIII. 1f.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 217

of shaming the back-sliding aristocracy into living up to the professional and

aristocratic ideal of service. It condemned the idle uncharitable landlord, the

‘lazy, luxurious good-for-nothing man, monopolizing to his own use the profits

of twenty thousand acres of land’, who did not fulfil the social and political duties

which alone justified his property.

We have already seen how the revivalists

failed to revive the ideal in any but a handful of the aristocracy. The leader of the

handful, Lord Ashley, complained to his diary that he was disliked and shunned

for his paternalism towards the farm labourers not merely by his class but by his

kinsfolk.

In the second generation the Christian Socialists—‘a band of friends, chiefly

clergymen and barristers’—again sought to revive the ‘moral guidance and

leadership’ of the aristocracy, but although they sought ‘to separate…that

socialism which Mr. Southey and other eminent Conservatives believed to be the

best solution of the practical difficulties of England, from Communism, Red

Republicanism, or any other anarchical opinion whatever,’ it is clear that their very

name alienated the propertied classes whom they hoped to woo, and their influence

was practically confined to a section of the clergy—and perhaps their families,

including Edward Denison, son of the Bishop of Salisbury, and their main link with

the East End ‘settlers’ and the Charity Organization Society—and to some

Idealist academics and ‘new model’ trade unionists.

In the third generation, Octavia Hill, the East End ‘settlers’ and the Charity

Organization Society still aimed to introduce the ‘delight’ of the rural landlord

‘to keep thus fair the part of the earth over which it has been given to rule’ into

‘some of the lowest districts of London.’

But they found precious few landlords

to support them—save such as Ruskin the professional art critic and Peabody the

American millionaire—and were forced to invent the ‘university settlement’ and

the C.O.S. to enable unpropertied academics, clergymen and their kind to

perform the paternal duties of the missing squire. In the end, not only was the

Cf. B.Webb, Our Partnership (1948), p. 210 (diary, 25 January 1901): ‘Reading Leslie

Stephen’s Utilitarians. Always interesting to compare one’s own point of view with that

of one’s parents! For Bentham was certainly Sidney’s intellectual godfather….’

G.B.Shaw, ‘How the Middle Class is Fleeced’, speech in Chelsea Town Hall, The

Times, 18 October 1907; R.Lewis and A.Maude, The English Middle Classes (1949), p.

75.

[Johnstone], ‘The Present Crisis’, Blackwood’s, 1830, XXVIII. 692.

E.Hoddcr, Life of Shaftesbury, (1886) I. 358 (diary, Christmas Day, 1851).

J.S.Mill, Principles, p. 471; F.D.Maurice, op. cit., p. 32; F.Maurice, Life of F.D.Maurice

(1884), II, 92; J.Saville, ‘The Christian Socialists of 1848’, in J. Saville, ed., Democracy

and the Labour Movement (1954); Woodroofe, op. cit., pp. 48–50, 65–6; C.L.Mowat, The

Charity Organisation Society, 1869–1913 (1961), pp. 8, 11; R.Harrison, Before the

Socialists (1965), pp. 15, 251, 327n.

Octavia Hill, ‘Blank Court, or Landlords and Tenants’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1871,

XXIV. 456f.

218 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

divergence between the aristocratic and professional versions of the ideal

complete, but by a twist of historical irony the professional version split precisely

as the aristocratic had done in the last days of the old society. One part indeed,

through remarkable clergymen like Stewart Headlam, the Fabian, and Canon

Barnett, went on to revive paternal welfare through what the latter called

‘practicable socialism’.

The other, through C.S.Loch, Helen Bosanquet and the

C.O.S., set out to revive paternal discipline and the rigours of the 1834 poor law,

and, greatest irony of all, to oppose every collectivist social reform with the most

uncompromising adherence to the entrepreneurial principle of laissez-faire.

The third stream, that of the professional apologists of the working-class ideal,

was a more fugitive one, which ran underground for long distances, and flowed

out unexpectedly in individuals as diverse as Charles Hall, Thomas Hodgskin,

Bronterre O’Brien, John Minter Morgan, E.S.Beesly, Frederic Harrison, and—

for what class if not the professional one did he belong to?—Karl Marx himself.

Such men were not, it is true, typical professional men, for it required

extraordinary independence of mind and strength of character to adopt the

working-class ideal—which is why it attracted only the more remarkable ‘social

cranks’ from the non-professional classes, Robert Owen, William Thompson,

Frederick Engels, H.M.Hyndman, and so on. Yet, paradoxically, there was a

greater consistency in this stream of thought than in the other two. Although the

professional thinkers offered as great a variety of means of curing the ills of

society as the infinitely various working-class ideal was capable of, they

consistently applied to it the same criteria, the professional criteria of

justification by service, and demanded what amounted to the same end: a new-

minted professional society based on expertise (skilled labour by hand and brain)

and selection by merit (from each according to his ability).

In the first generation the Owenite and other primitive communist thinkers

came nearer to success in inspiring the working class with their Utopian visions

than any later group, but the visions faded into the realities of the Rochdale

Pioneers or the mirage of O’Connor’s Land Plan.

In the second, Beesly,

Harrison and the Positivists, despite their great services to the trade union

movement, never remotely interested the British working class in the Religion of

Humanity and the new, functional society of Comte, while Marx had even less

success in converting them to the communist theory of revolution.

In the third,

socialist ideas spread rather more widely in the working class, but, by another

historical irony, they were not so much the socialist ideas of William Morris,

F.G.Bettany, Stewart Headlam (1926); S.A.Barnett, Practicable Socialism (1916);

Henrietta O.W.Barnett, Canon Barnett, his Life, Work and Friends (1919).

Mowat, op. cit., pp. 21–4, 114–17; Woodroofe, op. cit., pp. 34–5; and the Majority Report

of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and the Relief of Distress, P.P., 1909, (Cd.

4499), XXVII. 1, passim. (Loch, Bosanquet, and four other members of the C.O.S. were

members of the Majority).

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 219

H.M.Hyndman, and the revolutionary tradition, but those of the evolutionary

tradition which derived rather from the other two streams of thought. The very

‘socialisms’, Christian and Millite, which had alienated the landed and capitalist

classes respectively from their professional apologists, now came together,

through Davidson and Headlam on the one side, and Shaw and the Webbs on the

other, in the Fabian Society, and that apotheosis of the professional ideal which

we have already noticed.

This gave the professional ideal a fresh start in

infiltrating and moralizing the working class, though it can hardly claim to have

made much headway before the end of the century. Meanwhile, the alienation

from the bulk of the working class of the Utopian visionaries, from the Owenites

to Marx, was complete.

In each case the alienation was inevitable. Even when they were expressing

the other classes’ ideals the ideal citizen for professional men was not at bottom

the responsible landlord, the active capitalist or the co-operative labourer. It was

the professional man himself. Blackwood’s complained that ‘the Philosophers…

are getting up what they are pleased to call a New Aristocracy—an Aristocracy of

Science’ which ‘is to be the enemy and ruler of the old one.’ William Thompson

attacked Hodgskin’s stress on ‘mental labourers, literati, men of science’ and

James Mill’s middle rank exempt from the need to labour ‘which gives to

science, to art and to legislation itself their most distinguished ornaments, the

chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature.’ For Coleridge

The Clerisy of the nation, or national Church in its primary acceptation and

original intention, comprehended the learned of all denominations, the

sages and professors of the law and of jurisprudence, of medicine and

physiology, of music, of military and civil architecture, with the

mathematical as the common organ of the preceding; in short, all the so-

called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which

constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the theological.

J.S.Mill thought that the government should provide ‘by means of endowments or

salaries for the maintenance of what has been called a learned class.’ For Carlyle

‘the ancient guides of Nations, Prophets, Priests, or whatever their name,’ had

been succeeded by ‘the modern guides of Nations, who also go under a variety

of names, Journalists, Political Economists, Politicians, Pamphleteers,’ in a new

‘Aristocracy of Talent’.

It was not to be expected that the other classes should share their self-

admiration. There was in all three major classes a built-in suspicion of

Cf. chap. viii, § 3, below.

Cf. R.Harrison, op. cit., chap. vi, ‘The Positivists: a Study of Labour’s Intellectuals’.

Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism (1961), chap. i; A.M.McBriar, Fabian

Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge, 1966), chap. i.

220 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

intellectuals, of men who were two disinterested to be reliable, who had no hard

economic interest to bind them to their adopted class. This was in fact an

extension of the suspicion of all ‘social cranks’, whose whimsicality had led them

into the quixotic championship of a different class, and might at any moment

lead them out again. Suspicion of intellectuals led the T.U.C. to exclude Frederic

Harrison and all other middle-class sympathizers from membership in 1883, and

suspicion of the ‘advanced Liberals’, the middle-class ‘cranks’, both professional

and capitalist, who were leading the Liberal Party into both land and social

reform was to help to alienate the Whig landowners and Liberal business men

who drifted to the Tories in the last quarter of the century.

In the long run the

attempt by professional thinkers to moralize the other class ideals failed, as

moralizing without a material quid pro quo is apt to do.

In the short run, however, they were by no means unsuccessful. At least they

persuaded the State and the public to accept what may be called the highest

common factor of the three rival streams, notably social justification by service,

the need for expertise and selection by merit in public administration, and the

principles of happiness, progress and efficiency as the aims of government.

Much of this was achieved at the practical level, by moralizing society in and

through the process of social reform. The question has been much debated whether

the great social reforms of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, in poor

law, factory inspection, police and prisons, public health, education, control of

the emigration traffic, and so on, were mainly the work of the Benthamites or

were brought about by ‘an independent historical process’, impersonal and

anonymous, the effect of a pervasive humanitarianism acting under the pressure

of ‘intolerable’ facts. The controversy has become a scholastic dispute about an

unverifiable question: whether the men who discovered the facts and found them

‘intolerable’ and those, often drawn from the same group, who devised and

administered the machinery to reform them, were or were not all Benthamites, in

the sense that they had ‘read Bentham or heard of his name.’

The truth is that

the first group of reformers, who discovered and protested about intolerable facts,

were primarily ‘social cranks’ for whom the professional ideal had a special

appeal, while the second group, the great reforming civil servants, were by

definition professional men, on whom it operated directly.

On the first group—men like Hume and Place against the Combination Acts,

Senior and Chad wick against the old poor law, Sadler, Oastler and Ashley in

factory reform, Chadwick, Bishop Blomfield and Ashley again in public health—

[Robinson], ‘The Nobility’, Blackwood’s, 1825, XVIII. 350; Pankhurst, Thompson, p.

27; Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (1852 ed.), pp. 54–5; Mill,

Principles, p. 589; Carlyle, Past and Present (1893 ed.), pp. 23–4.

S. and B.Webb, Trade Unionism, p. 374n. ; R.C.K.Ensor, ‘Some Political and Economic

Interactions in Later Victorian England’, Trans. R.H.S., 1949, XXXI. 17f., which,

however, places too much weight on reaction against Irish violence, to the neglect of

English land and social reform.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 221

the professional ideal operated in two ways. It worked on them through the

professional social critics amongst them and the leaven of professionalism which

they introduced into the other class ideals, as, for example, when the

Blackwood’s contributors stiffened the aristocratic opposition to the total

abolition of the poor law, or McCulloch and Senior overrode the entrepreneurial

principle of the free market in labour as applied to children in factories and

women in mines.

And it offered a professional solution to particular problems—

expert, disinterested, administrative control and inspection—which more often

than not proved to be the only effective alternative. In factory reform, for

example, while Sadler and Ashley clung to the amateur principle of inspection by

J.P.s in their bills of 1832–33, it was the professionals on the 1833 Commission,

Chadwick, Tooke and Southwood Smith, who pushed full-time inspectors, on the

professional ground that no one else would have an interest in enforcing the law.

Two of the three professionals belonged to the second group, the great civil

servants on whom the professional ideal worked directly. Chadwick and Smith

were conscious Benthamites, and so were many more of them: Leonard Horner,

Kay-Shuttle-worth, Farr, Mann, Farrer, Helps, Porter, Deacon Hume,

Tremenheere, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and so on. Equally, some of them were not:

Matthew Arnold, Sir John Simon, Tom Taylor, to name only three. Whether they

were or not, they all represented the new conception of a civil service

independent of ministerial patronage, based on expertise and selection by merit.

Their aims and methods were simply professional: objective study of the

problem, fearless recommendation of a creative solution, ruthless lobbying

through official and unofficial channels, and shameless empire building to carry

it out. Their reports were a vehicle for their professionalism: as a Vice-President

of the Council said of those of the education inspectors, ‘instead of being

collections of facts [they] were essays propounding new theories and startling

systems of their own.’

Yet this meant that they were, willy-nilly, Benthamites, conscious or

unconscious. Bentham stood above all for efficient, responsible government,

what J.S.Mill called ‘the combination of complete popular control over public

affairs, with the greatest attainable perfection of skilled agency.’

Bentham’s

Cf., inter alia, O.MacDonagh, ‘The 19th Century Revolution in Government: A

Reappraisal’, Hist.J., 1958, I. 52f.; H.Parris. The 19th-century Revolution in Government:

a Reappraisal Reappraised’, ibid., 1960, III. 17f.; Jenifer Hart, ‘19th-century Social

Reform: a Tory Interpretation of History’, Past and Present, 1965, No. 31, 39f.; Valeric

Cromwell, ‘Interpretations of 19th-century Administration: an Analysis’, Victorian

Studies, 1966, IX, 245f.

Cf. § 3, above; and Robbins, op. cit., pp. 101–2.

Hart, loc. cit., p. 42,

Mary Sturt, The Education of the People (1967), p. 239.

222 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

method of dealing with any problem of government or society—Inquiry, Report,

Legislation, Administration, Inspection—was exactly that which was applied by

both groups of reformers, but especially by the professional administrators.

If he

did not specifically forecast the process by which the administrators and inspectors

were to be educated by the ‘intolerable’ facts which they reported on, and used

them to evoke still further legislation and administration and inspection, it was at

least in the logic of his method.

Does this mean that Bentham influenced the process of reform which he

foresaw and advocated? Not necessarily in every case. There were no doubt

reforming administrators who had not read Bentham, and some perhaps—

although it is very hard to believe—who had not heard of his name. Their

professionalism and the pressure of intolerable facts eventually carried them, if

more slowly, by the same road to the same goal. But those who had read

Bentham, or talked to those who had, could travel all the faster for knowing

where they were going. For the important question is not so much who Bentham

influenced as why they were influenced by him, and the answer is that Bentham

spoke to their professional condition. Despite his rentier’s income and his

apparent championship of the entrepreneurial ideal,

Bentham was, above all in

his chosen field of government, the apotheosis of the professional ideal. He stood

for expert, efficient administration in the interests of the greatest happiness of the

greatest number.

Whether Benthamite or merely professional, the great social and

administrative reforms were part of the professionalization of government which

was the greatest political achievement of nineteenth-century Britain. They were

also, as we shall see in the next chapter, an aspect of the divergence of the

professional ideal from the entrepreneurial in social policy which was ultimately

to help to undermine entrepreneurial society. But first we have to see the triumph

of the entrepreneurial ideal in nearly every other field, which preceded and

determined the establishment of that society.

Mill, Autobiography, p. 225.

Cf. David Roberts, The Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven,

Conn., 1960), passim.

There were considerable differences of economic doctrine and emphasis between

Bentham and his disciples James Mill and Ricardo—cf. T.W.Hutchison, ‘Bentham as an

Economist’, Econ.J., 1956, LXVI. 288f.

Cf. Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (1861), pp. 78–9: ‘It is impossible to overrate the

importance to a nation or profession of having a distinct object to aim at in the pursuit of

improvement. The secret of Bentham’s immense influence in England during the past

thirty years is his success in placing such an object before us. He gave us a clear rule of

reform.’—Dicey, op. cit., p. 168n. (my italics).

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 223