James Crimmins's collection gives a state-of-the-art account of Bentham's political thought, largely from within the ‘liberal’ programme in Bentham studies, characteristically blending the genres of biography, intellectual history and political theory. He discusses mid- to late-period Bentham's democratic and republican writings with authority, focusing not only on Constitutional Code but on less well-known works and correspondence on moral, legal and democratic reform, and drawing on parallel formulations in Bentham's entire corpus. At the centre of Crimmins's attention stand the development and internal consistency of Bentham's thought, but past and present critics spur him on to discuss and defend the philosophical merits of Bentham's position. He sets out Bentham's ideas before a rich historical background of their political context, of the coalitions Bentham tried to strike up and the (many) fights he picked, discussing the conditions for utilitarian political success and failure between no-nonsense Whigs and Radical firebrands. The book starts out with a chapter on the debate between Whigs and Radicals in the Edinburgh Review and Westminster Review over James Mill's Essay on Government and ends with a detailed account of Bentham's late alliances for political reform, focusing on his long, but less than successful, cooperation with Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Catholic, Republican and Westminster Radical. Other chapters deal with Bentham's critique of monarchy, his surprisingly late ‘conversion’ to republican government, and with the parallels and differences between Bentham's and David Hume's accounts of utility. Crimmins's point of departure, alluded to in the title of the book, is T. B. Macaulay's devastating critique of James Mill in his Utilitarian Logic and Politics (1829). Macaulay alleges that the principle of utility is so abstract as to be virtually meaningless, and can serve to justify all policies and their opposites, too. While Bentham did not personally get involved in the debate between Mill and Thomas Perronet Thompson on the one side, and James Mackintosh, Macaulay and William Thompson on the other, he reacted by refining his position for the occasion in the ‘Article on Utilitarianism’. Crimmins uses the ‘Article’ as a springboard from which to develop late Bentham's integrated conception of democratic and legal reform, from abstract first and subordinate principles to exact prescriptions on institutional reform.

Because of their varying investments in either political history or political philosophy, the seven chapters appear somewhat uneven. But they are unified by a single question, spelled out in chapter 4, ‘The Structure and Application of Utilitarian Theory’. How, Crimmins asks, did Bentham propose to ‘operationalize’ and implement the principle of utility? Besides the obvious strategic dimension of the question, and besides the vagaries of utilitarianism's political fortune, there is a philosophical side to it: how is the principle of utility to be ‘translated’ into institutional politics? In line with recent scholarship, the book emphasizes the role that secondary principles like security and equality play in the realization of utility, and defends an overall liberal democratic interpretation of Bentham's thought. Its most striking and innovative aspect, and its advance over earlier ‘revisionist’ writing, lies in its multi-faceted attempt to spell out Bentham's specific type of egalitarianism.

A first attempt to reinterpret Bentham's commitment to equality starts with his late reformulation of the principle of utility. Building on the work of Fred Rosen and others, Crimmins points out that after 1826 Bentham substitutes the phrases ‘the greatest happiness’ or ‘the greatest happiness of all, without exception, in so far as possible’ for the phrase ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. The earlier phrase had had more of an exhortational and less of a systematic sense: in the perennial conflict between the ruling few and the subject many, always side with the larger number. But deleting the phrase ‘of the greatest number’ is now taken to indicate Bentham's systematic egalitarian credentials, his respect for the claims of the individual, to the point that everybody ‘ought to enjoy an equal quantity of happiness’ (p. 63). But this inference, even when qualified by feasibility conditions, appears unwarranted. On the contrary, it seems that the new phrasing still invites an aggregative reading of ‘the greatest happiness’: honour all individuals, without exception, in so far as possible, through awarding them the same chance of having their interest respected in a utilitarian lottery. The new, ‘improved’ formulation is no sufficient bulwark to defend an egalitarian distribution of individual well-being against aggregative challenges, and will not lay to rest liberal readers’ worries about the equal protection of each person's happiness under utilitarianism.

A second strategy seems more promising. Crimmins offers three chapters on political equality, republicanism and representative government, arguing that a key to Bentham's egalitarianism lies with his democratic theory. In general, Bentham's preoccupation with democratic rule can be said to have two dimensions, a negative and a positive one. On the one hand, democracy serves a purely defensive function. It is to enforce ‘securities against misrule’, ensuring the successful self-defence of the people against the sinister interests of their governors. This is the dimension of democracy that Bentham himself spends most time and energy on and where he offers greatest clarity and consistency, but where his democratic vision is limited to the antagonism between ruling few and subject many. On the other hand, according to Bentham's positive view, democracy can be seen as a system of understanding, defining, communicating and implementing what utility demands. From the negative point of view, we must assume that the people already know what that is. In a positive perspective, they have yet to learn and shape their interest and convert it into practical, non-defensive institutions and policies. What distinguishes Crimmins's take on democracy from that of other recent works is the emphasis he puts on aspects of the second dimension, hewing out building blocks of what might be termed a democratic version of indirect utilitarianism. He follows the lead of a neglected article by Guyora Binder according to which in utilitarian politics ‘process values take precedence over substantive values’. Crimmins's central argument takes the form of a process-based interpretation of what John Stuart Mill called ‘Bentham's dictum’, namely that everybody was ‘to count for one and nobody for more than one’. The elusive source of the ‘dictum’ was located only ten years ago, by Philip Schofield, in a slightly different form of words in Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence: ‘Every individual in the country tells for one; no individual for more than one’ (It was the 3,500 pages of the five-volume Rationale that the twenty-year-old Mill had been editing when his mental breakdown occurred.) As Crimmins argues, Mill never used the ‘dictum’ for the next three decades, but the phrase must have continued to echo in his head and finally surfaced, in slightly but significantly different wording, in Utilitarianism (1861). In contrast to Mill's version, Bentham's original ‘dictum’ can be given a speech act-theoretic gloss. Bentham's demand that everybody ‘tell for one’, Crimmins argues, should not be understood as awarding equal consideration or equal treatment to everyone, but equal political voice. The principal point of Bentham's version of the ‘dictum’ is that everybody ‘tells for herself’, and nobody's voice gets ranked over that of any other person. Everyone, Bentham seems to say, has to speak for herself and only for herself in political matters. The basic egalitarian element in Bentham's utilitarianism, then, is the opportunity for an equal exercise of political agency, and not the equality of outcome in material redistribution, nor the empirical equalizer of diminishing marginal utility, perhaps not even the equal consideration of everybody's interests, at least not if this is taken to refer to an external legislator's impartialist stance in counting and weighing other people's stakes.

Still, in closing one needs to ask whether equality of political voice is more resilient against the pressures of aggregation than the spurious claim to equal happiness is under the reformulated principle of utility. Under a standard interpretation of Mill's ‘dictum’ as affording everybody equal consideration, it would be hard to rule out an aggregate ‘sacrificing’ of the interests of some to the overriding interests of a majority. Do individuals do better under the speech act-theoretic interpretation of Bentham's original dictum? From the perspective of liberal revisionism, equal political voice in itself can hardly ensure equal protection for individuals in so far as it needs to bow to the aggregation procedure of majority rule. The demands and consequences of political equality in Bentham's political thought therefore cannot be understood independently of the exact workings of democratic will-formation and decision-making. Crimmins sketches the beginnings of a plausible account, situating Bentham within the context of today's discussions of deliberative democracy (pp. 154–6), but without much textual support. It is here that future studies will need to fill in the details if they want to contribute towards making Bentham's utilitarianism safe for liberal democracy.