Catechism (1817) in the Edinburgh Review of 1818, James Mackintosh criticized
Bentham’s proposals, which amply reflected American democracy. Mackintosh doubted that, ‘all interests will be best protected, where the representatives are chosen by all men’.16 He insisted that universal suffrage and secret ballot were of no use in securing the interests of all classes. Mackintosh stated that Bentham’s use of the American experience did not support his radical proposal. In Mackintosh’s view, universal suffrage did not exist in America because of the existence of slavery. Moreover, thanks to the existence of the vast frontier, a majority of the people possessed property, and the greater part of the people ‘are either landholders, or just about to be so’. Even if it were admitted that universal suffrage was established in America, it could not be introduced into Europe, as there were crucial differences between America and Europe where
‘crowded cities and unequal fortunes’ existed.17
4. Jeremy Bentham, the Westminster Review, and America i
Despite his life-long hostility to the natural rights doctrine, which gave the
philosophical foundation to the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, as well as to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Bentham greatly approved of the United States in his later years.18 He came to be interested in America in two ways.19 First, he regarded America as potentially a vast
16 Mackintosh (1818) 184.
17 Ibid., 200-1.
18 He described himself as ‘at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman’. (Jeremy Bentham to Andrew Jackson, 14 June 1830, Jackson (1929) 146.) In 1817, Bentham referred to his ‘two works in which I have appeared in the character of a Philo-Yankee’. (Jeremy Bentham to John Adams Smith, 22 December 1817, Bentham (1968-) ix, 137.) While these two works are assumed by the editor of the Correspondence as Plan of Parliamentary Reform and Letters to Lord Pelham, Philip Schofield suggests that the relevant works are Plan and Papers relative to Codification and Public Instruction, both of which appeared in 1817.
19 For Bentham’s view on, and relation with, America, see Williamson (1955); Crook (1965) 11-68; Hart (1982) 53-78; ‘Editorial Introduction’, Bentham (1998) xii-xxi.
ground for experiments in codification. Bentham wanted the United States to
emancipate herself from the yoke of the common law by the introduction of a complete and rationalized utilitarian code of law, what he termed the ‘pannomion’. He thought that under a democratic form of government, rulers might be so placed that they only had motives to promote the general interest, unlike under a monarch, where they tended to promote their own sinister interests. This seems to be the reason why he believed that his ideal system of code might be introduced in America.
Second, Bentham paid full attention to many of the constitutional features of the United States, and approved of her democratic form of government. Among his contemporaries, he was one of the most doctrinaire in his approval of the American representative system. For Bentham, it was not direct democracy, but well-arranged representative democracy, which had been seen only in America, that was the only form of government which could deliver the greatest happiness of the greatest number in terms of the identification of interests between the ruler and the ruled. D. P. Crook writes that America could provide support for Bentham’s constitutional theory, even though he might not have derived most of his democratic ideas from the experience of America.20 Bentham’s admiration for American government developed alongside his radical critique of the British constitution.
Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform contained a number of favourable references to the United States as a good example of ‘pure representative democracy’, often being contrasted with vices in the British constitution. He found positive aspects of ‘pure democracy’ in the United States, not merely of ‘democratic ascendancy in a mixt government’. Nowhere else did there exist ‘so regular, so well-regulated a government’ as in the United States.21 In addition, his Radicalism not Dangerous (1820) had a section entitled ‘Defence from Experience in the Case of the United States’. Bentham stated that, though ‘the features or elements of radicalism, secrecy, universality, equality, annuality of suffrage’ were virtually realized in some states of the United States, subversion of the rights of property, which the opponents of democracy
20 Crook (1965) 14. Frederick Rosen and Philip Schofield argue that, in the 1790s, Bentham did not regard the United States as a model of democratic government because of her unique circumstances. See Rosen (1983) 35; Schofield (2004) 397-8.
21 Bentham (1817) xli-xlii. [Bowring, iii, 447.]
feared, had never come about, and ‘nowhere in the Union have any of those of symptoms of misrule at any times shown themselves’.22
Bentham’s praise of the United States was based on a utilitarian perspective. He thought that America successfully introduced constitutional devices which enabled her to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The American government was, he believed, superior to that of Britain in that it pursued only the general interest, and never served the separate and sinister interest of the few.
ii
Bentham’s view of America influenced the tone of his fellow utilitarians’ arguments.
The Westminster Review, Bentham’s newly-founded periodical intended to form the political organ of the Philosophic Radicals, often published articles which discussed America. In his article in the first number of the Review, Peregrine Bingham, one of the most important contributors in the first few years of the Review, posed the following question: ‘if it [a great mass of happiness in America] be enjoyed, how far this good effect is ascribable to the nature of the government, how far to other causes?’ His answer was that almost all good phenomena in America were attributable to her
governmental system, particularly representative government, and bad phenomena, such as slavery, to peculiarities of American society.23 This mode of argument became a typical strategy which most Westminster Reviewers followed. Most articles on America in the Review contained more or less favourable accounts of the current condition of American society, and were, either explicitly or implicitly, combined with a critique of the state of Britain. The Westminster Reviewers compared various aspects of Britain with those of America: expensive government with cheap government; the existence of the Anglican Church with the absence of such an established church; the lack of a free press with the existence of it; economic stagnation with rapid economic growth; and limited education with universal education.
As far as America was concerned, another important contributor to the Westminster Review was John Neal, an American writer and critic, and a propagandist of
22 Bowring, iii, 612-3.
23 Bingham (1824) 103.
utilitarianism in America. He met Bentham and other members of the utilitarian circle during his visit to England in 1824, and Bentham invited him to stay at his house in Queen’s Square Place.24 Neal’s Westminster Review article on America formed a good example of the positive tone of the Review. As for slavery in the south of the United States, for instance, he was optimistic about the future, even though he condemned the current situation: ‘if they [i.e. the proposals he had in mind] were adopted forthwith … and acted upon throughout, slavery would be no more, in the whole United States of North America, within fifty years from today’.25
Thus, even though the Westminster Reviewers criticized American tariff policy and the legal system, as well as slavery, they were in general sympathetic and optimistic.
They insisted that no matter how unsatisfactory her current condition, America was improving, and would continue to improve. This, they believed, was due to her popular government.
iii
The Philosophic Radicals’ praise of America was closely associated with a critique of the state of Britain. In his commentary on the Quarterly Review in the second volume of the Westminster Review in 1824, James Mill wrote: ‘Whoever speaks against the Americans, is to receive implicit credit [from the Quarterly Review], and no questions asked. Whoever says any thing in their favour, is to be told that he or she is a liar, and a knave, and a fool; agreeably to the most approved rules of the aristocratical logic.’26 It was, to his mind, a result of the Quarterly Review’s usual mode of praising ‘the
blessings of the British Constitution’.27 Even when the Westminster Reviewers found favourable views on America in rival periodicals, they saw them as hypocritical.
J. S. Mill, for example, dismissed the Edinburgh Review’s favourable comments on America as follows:
an article on America, in the thirty-first volume, contains an unusual proportion of democratic sentiments. The same observation applies to another article on the same
24 See King (1966).
25 Neal (1826) 186-7.
26 James Mill (1824: QR) 487.
27 Ibid., 479.
subject, in the thirty-third volume, where a charge which had been brought against the Review of illiberality towards America, seems to have extorted from it sundry expressions in favour of popular governments, exceeding perhaps, in boldness, any which had yet appeared in its pages.28
Alexander Brady states that ‘they [i.e. the Philosophic Radicals] looked to America to demonstrate the virtues of democracy, and abundant praise of the United States became their orthodox practice’.29 They praised the United States as they believed that the principle of utility was applied more assiduously in the United States than in Britain.
Furthermore, they thought that the experience of America could offer grounds for attacking the existing British constitution and supporting its reform. As one
Westminster Reviewer asserted, the worth of the institutions which had been introduced into America but not yet into Britain, such as representative democracy, a free press, and religious liberty, had ‘demonstrated practical results in the multiplied advantages of the many’, and could not be ‘destroyed by the railing of the interested few’.30
Given this intellectual milieu, it is unsurprising that Mill came to be interested in America. Like his fellow radicals, he had an interest in America as the only nation where democracy was realized in practice, and recognized that it had a crucial
significance for all European thinkers and politicians who argued, whether for or against, democracy. It was this intellectual climate that led Mill to attempt to rebut
anti-democratic or anti-parliamentary reform arguments, using the example of America.
This is not to deny the importance of Tocqueville in the development of Mill’s political thought. The deepening of his understanding of American society, and the subsequent crucial developments in his political thought, were stimulated by the appearance of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Most of Mill’s ideas on America had found antecedents in the periodical literature (including the Westminster Review) and books published before Democracy in America. Hence, it is not true that Mill derived his knowledge about America exclusively from Tocqueville’s study.
28 JSM, ‘Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review’ (April 1824), CW, i, 300-1. The articles in question were Sydney Smith’s ‘Travellers in America’ and Francis Jeffrey’s ‘Dispositions of England and America’, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of December 1818 and of May 1820 respectively.
29 Alexander Brady, ‘Introduction’, CW, xviii, xviii.
30 Patmore (1824) 556.
Nevertheless, Mill thought that the works which had appeared before Tocqueville were not only fragmentary and superficial but also party-biased, and thereby lacked any philosophical perspective with which the relevant phenomena could be systematically understood.
By discussing America, Mill, like his contemporaries, attempted to offer a practical argument within the political context of his age. At the same time, however, he aspired to develop an analytical, value-free argument without relation to the context. For the Mill of this period, Tocqueville was a philosopher who offered a deeper, broader, and more impartial account of phenomena in America than any writer before him. As will be seen, what Mill gained from Tocqueville was above all a perspective from which he was able to interpret America comprehensively and impartially.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America