Looking back on his student days in the 1880s, W. W. Buckland recalled that John Austin “was a religion: today he seems to be regarded rather as a disease” (1). The fate of Austin the man and the scholar is a curious one. Thanks to Jeremy Bentham's failure to put his extensive writings on the theory of law into print, it was his follower Austin who came to be regarded as the founder of English jurisprudence. But where his master continued to think and write prodigiously into his eighties, Austin was demoralized by the unpopularity of his lecture course at the University of London. He wrote no more jurisprudence after he resigned his chair in 1835 and refused even to allow the republication of his first six lectures, which had come out in print as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined in 1832. It was thus left to his tireless and industrious wife Sarah to secure his influence and reputation by publishing his lectures after his death. Thanks to her, Austin's analytical and positivist approach—rather than Bentham’s—became dominant. It was largely due to his influence that English jurisprudence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained largely analytical in character, while the most important English work on legal theory of the twentieth century—H. L. A. Hart's Concept of Law—was written as a response to weaknesses in Austin's command theory of law.

Wilfrid Rumble's work has long been familiar to scholars of Austin, especially through his 1985 book The Thought of John Austin. This new volume seeks to complement the earlier study by examining the responses to Austin's work by his English nineteenth-century contemporaries and successors. He shows that these reactions often foreshadow twentieth-century criticisms of the jurist (such as those of Hart) and sometimes emphasize aspects of his work neglected by later critics. Moreover, the responses changed over time. Where the first reviewers (in the 1830s) focused on Austin's utilitarianism, later commentators saw it as irrelevant to his project of analyzing legal terminology and distinguishing law from morality. Those who endorsed his scientific approach to law, such as T. E. Holland, therefore aimed to narrow Austin's work into a purer analytical jurisprudence by removing the utilitarian political thought. But not all jurists agreed with the separation of law and morals espoused by Austin: as Rumble shows, a number of now obscure figures (including Edward Creasy, C. J. Foster, and J. M. Lightwood) wanted to revive a broader approach that rejected the separation of law and morals.

Rumble uses contemporary reviews as a prism to shed new light on our understanding of the work, though he does not always explore the intellectual contexts as fully as he might. For instance, he draws attention to an early review of the Province, which argued that Austin's empirical approach to human laws was contradicted by an a priori belief in the existence of a divine law, to which utility was an index. Admitting the inconsistency, Rumble speculates that Austin may have included the notion of divine law in order to counter those critics who attacked the “godless” University of London for having no theological instruction, though he admits the explanation is not entirely convincing. In fact, a closer examination of the theoretical issues at stake would reveal that Austin's reference to God was the product of an intellectual heritage, and not merely a public relations exercise. Unlike Bentham, Austin did not attempt to relate all moral questions to the physical sensations of pleasure and pain. A theological source of moral obligation therefore remained central to his work, as it was to that of his fellow utilitarian, William Paley. However, it was emphatically not one which was to be understood through a moral sense: instead, it was to be discovered through experience. Austin's moral epistemology was thus empiricist, and consistent, but it owed more to Locke than to Bentham.

The question of whether Austin's analytical system was based on formal definitions or on empirical observations has long divided scholars. For Rumble, there is evidence to support both views: indeed, the reviews reveal that there was “not a single Austin, but numerous Austins” (257). There was both an “empiricist” Austin, who criticized the rationalism of German philosophy and who (according to J. S. Mill) used an inductive approach to abstract general notions from observed facts, and a “rationalist and essentialist” Austin, who sought necessary legal notions that (it is argued) rested more on definition and stipulation derived from a priori reason than on observation. The tension between the two Austins is interestingly explored in the chapter on Mill's reaction to Austin's work, although no real attempt is made to reconcile them. Indeed, while praising Mill's “first-rate exposition of Austin's ideas” (96), Rumble suggests that Mill failed to recognize the ambiguities, which “may say something about the limitations not only of his understanding of Austin, but his own views” (96). This is not wholly convincing: would the most important nineteenth-century British philosopher, who had twenty years earlier written the System of Logic, and who had a hand in getting Austin's work to press, really have failed to notice an epistemological problem in his former teacher's work? A fuller explanation of Mill's own views and how they relate to Austin's might have given more insight into the problem of the coherence of Austin's epistemology. It is an important issue, not only for making sense of his own work, but also for the wider history of the common law. After all, his analytical approach was highly important to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century jurists on both sides of the Atlantic, who used his method to give a coherent and rational explanation of doctrines that grew out of the common-law tradition.

No doubt scholars will continue to debate the nature and coherence of Austin's jurisprudence. In doing so, they will find much useful and interesting material in Rumble's fluently written and highly readable book, which not only uncovers many hitherto neglected responses to Austin but also offers many new insights into the work of some of the less well-known legal writers in nineteenth-century England. Rumble also leaves the reader with an intriguing counterfactual. Had Austin not been such an inept lecturer, he suggests, his courses might have proved more popular, and he might have continued to work on legal philosophy. He might then have turned to the general work on the science of ethics that he had projected as a young man. In other words, had Austin not been a failure, both the nature of his work and his influence might have been very different.