‘Happiness is political’, writes Mark Kaswan at the outset of this impressive study of the thought of Cork-born political philosopher, social radical and erstwhile merchant William Thompson (1778–1833), an observation that spotlights the author’s central focus on apparently rival conceptions of happiness and democracy, and their implications, among utilitarian theorists in early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. In particular, he contrasts Thompson with his friend Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the father of modern utilitarianism, stressing differences in their understandings of democracy and the ‘greatest happiness’ principle. Nonetheless, Thompson adopted much of the latter’s logic and terminology. Therefore, as the author states, ‘in order to understand Thompson it is necessary to go through Bentham’ (p. 97), a significant reminder that his subject’s social thought remained rooted in utilitarianism.

Much of this book is a teasing out of the differences and similarities between these two utilitarian thinkers. ‘Thompson and Bentham’, writes Kaswan, ‘share a conceptual framework, [but] they arrive at very different conclusions – Bentham being one of the great theorists of liberal capitalism, and Thompson one of the founders of socialism’ (p. ix). He argues that, crucially, the two men understood happiness very differently, with Thompson favouring a conception that was essentially social, while Bentham took an individualistic view (p. 79). Thompson’s three-month stay at Bentham’s London home in 1822–3 is evidence of their closeness, but it was probably also the beginning of a parting of ways, as he increased his contact with British social radicalism and worked on his Inquiry into the distribution of wealth (1824), the book that would confirm his shift towards socialism and away from the liberalism of mainstream utilitarianism. That said, as Kaswan rightly underlines, Thompson, a creative and independent thinker, never wholly abandoned Bentham’s ideas – many of his coordinates were still provided by utilitarianism. Indeed, his critique of ‘competitive’ political economy drew deeply from this intellectual well, making him a formidable opponent for those utilitarians who favoured the economic ‘system of individual competition’. By 1825, the young John Stuart Mill, then battling for Benthamite utilitarianism, was describing Thompson as the ‘Goliath of our antagonists’. Many decades later, Mill named him in his Autobiography (1873) as the ‘principal champion’ of the early socialists in their London debates with the utilitarians.

However, we need to be careful not to apply retrospectively all of Thompson’s 1824 views. In his analysis, Kaswan relies principally on evidence drawn from the Inquiry and other treatises penned by Thompson after his theoretical break from Bentham and his embrace of socialist co-operation. For that reason, it is important that this book is understood as a study of Thompson’s thought from that point onwards and not before. The observation, for example, that he was sceptical of representative democracy requires greater explanation. In fact, it is clear that Thompson saw systems of representative and participatory democracy co-existing but serving very different functions. After 1824, albeit from a more critical perspective, he remained an advocate of the American representative model and republicanism. Indeed, my own research for a new Thompson biography has thrown up previously missed texts that point to a much closer earlier affinity between Thompson and Bentham than Kaswan allows. Far from being ambivalent on the issue of representative democracy, Thompson published a series of more than a dozen robust articles in the first half of 1818 to popularise the positions adopted by Bentham in his Plan of parliamentary reform (1817) and a previous article indicated similar support for Bentham on judicial reform. Thompson, like Bentham, argued for ‘virtual universal suffrage’, with literacy as the test of whether somebody could be allowed the franchise. Interestingly, considering his Irish context, he believed that this literacy must be in the English language: Irish was still widely spoken in County Cork in 1818. In terms of his politics and utilitarianism, he was for the most part in agreement with Bentham from 1817 to about 1823−4 and can be safely categorised as a philosophic radical during this period.

The book under review focuses on political and social ideas, engaging much less with its subject’s life or historical background, but it should be noted that Kaswan suffers from the same disability as almost all interpreters of Thompson, including myself in the past, in his dependence on Richard Pankhurst’s William Thompson (1954) for biographical information. Unfortunately, Pankhurst’s book is unreliable and in important instances seriously misleading as a guide to Thompson’s life and political thought, and can only be used with great caution. But context is important and the discussion of ideas, especially political ideas, without accurately situating the thinker historically and personally is fraught with danger. Kaswan’s concerns are more contemporary and this lucid, commendable treatise is ultimately about what Thompson’s writings might mean for us today rather than with how they fit within their time.