As a philosopher rather than a historian, I approached this book with an uneasy expectation that it would prove to be drily antiquarian. There are indeed many portions of the book that will be of considerably more interest to intellectual historians than to philosophers. Though Wilfrid Rumble teaches in a department of political science, he is an intellectual historian who writes primarily for other people in his field. His book addresses historians' concerns – influences, responses, contexts, and the like – far more than philosophical matters such as the soundness of arguments. On the whole, however, my unease was not warranted. Doing Austin Justice sheds some interesting light at a number of junctures on the work of John Austin, whose ideas still deserve attention from anyone working in the philosophy of law. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be the fourth and fifth chapters of the volume, which deal respectively with Austin's lectures on utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill's assessment of Austin's jurisprudential theories. Rumble quite persuasively argues that, because modern commentators have widely neglected the utilitarian dimension of Austin's thought, they have been liable to underestimate the extent and originality of his contribution to philosophy.

Austin's work is still studied directly by philosophers who specialize in jurisprudence, but for the past four decades it has been best known as the target of H. L. A. Hart's strictures in The Concept of Law. Although Hart always highlighted his indebtedness to Austin as well as his far-reaching doubts, his many criticisms of Austin's theory – centred on Austin's inadequate grasp of the normativity of law – have led some contemporary legal philosophers to adopt a dismissive attitude towards Austin. Among some of those philosophers, indeed, ‘Austinian’ is a term of abuse. Though the best remedy for such dismissiveness is a careful perusal of Austin's lectures (which, when read, turn out to abound with subtle insights), Rumble's volume should likewise prove to be salutary. It will contribute to the efforts by other intellectual historians in recent years to restore some of the burnish to Austin's reputation, which was in decline long before Hart undertook his critique.

Indeed, one of the principal aims of Rumble's book is to explore the waxing and waning of Austin's eminence in the decades following his death. Though Austin was hardly unknown as a juristic thinker during his lifetime – as Rumble repeatedly points out – his posthumous prominence as such a thinker was far greater. During most of the nineteenth century in England after his death in 1859, he was a towering figure whose ideas were a cynosure for those who esteemed them and for those who were repelled by them. Virtually every English legal theorist felt a need to come to grips with Austin's analyses, whether out of admiration or out of opposition (or out of some combination of those two sentiments). During the twentieth century, however, Austin's reputation eroded. The deterioration was pithily captured in 1945 in a famous comment by W. W. Buckland, which is quoted on the opening page of Rumble's study. Buckland remarked that ‘in the days of my youth . . . Austin . . . was a religion: today he seems to be regarded rather as a disease’. Thus, when Hart singled out Austin as the principal foil for his own version of legal positivism, he was in some respects rescuing the nineteenth-century theorist from growing obscurity. Though his critique has discredited Austin in the eyes of some contemporary legal philosophers, it has undoubtedly prompted many other such philosophers to continue to read Austin seriously.

While Rumble has some interesting things to say about the twentieth century, his focus – as is indicated by the subtitle of his book – lies on the nineteenth century. He explores sundry aspects of Austin's work by tracing the reactions to it that were voiced during Austin's lifetime and in the decades following his death. Rumble pays detailed attention to reviews of Austin's Province of Jurisprudence Determined, but he also takes ample account of the appraisals of Austin by major figures such as Mill, Buckland, Henry Maine, Albert Dicey, and James Fitzjames Stephen. (Unfortunately, he touches on Henry Sidgwick only fleetingly.) Among the main topics covered are Austin's utilitarianism, his unpopularity as a lecturer, his status in the eyes of Victorians as a theorist of the science of law, and his conception of general jurisprudence. A piquant chapter near the end of the book recounts some criticisms of Austin by nineteenth-century jurists that to some degree prefigured the criticisms levelled much later by Hart. Although Rumble overstates the similarities between the earlier objections and the later, he performs a valuable service in bringing to light some partial precursors of Hart's attack.

All in all, then, Doing Austin Justice deserves plaudits. To say as much, however, is not to say that the book is entirely without faults. On the one hand, a complaint about the volume's dearth of philosophical ambition would be captious, since Rumble does not pretend to be a philosopher. On the other hand, complaints about certain aspects of the book's style are warranted irrespective of the author's disciplinary allegiance. The volume suffers from quite a degree of repetitiveness, especially among the chapters but also sometimes within them. A related fault is the occasional prolixity of the writing; some things are spelled out at greater length than is necessary or advisable. Moreover, although the prose is admirably lucid in most places, Rumble's rather slapdash use of pronouns intermittently gives rise to unclarity. (Since most of the instances of slapdash usage are in compliance with the rule that the antecedent of a singular or plural pronoun should be the singular or plural noun that most closely foregoes the pronoun, one can infer how unwise any punctilious adherence to that putative rule is.) Still, these shortcomings do not seriously detract from the merits of the book. It is a commendable volume. Let us hope that legal philosophers as well as intellectual historians will avail themselves of the fruits of Rumble's efforts.