HALEVY'S HOPES

Thanks in part to the work of other scholars represented in this symposium, Halévy's move from philosophy to history can be followed in some detail.Footnote ⁶ Like his friends and colleagues at the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, he began by promoting a vision of philosophy that clarified the role of reason, especially in its proper relation to modern science and ethics. In 1891 he wrote to Léon Brunschvicg, “We must take action against the wretched positivism from which we are emerging and the aggravating religiosity that could suck us in.”Footnote ⁷ Gradually, however, he became convinced that his own talent lay not in pure philosophy but rather in using logic to clarify the messy particularities of questions sociales.Footnote ⁸ Although he was deeply committed to a liberal democratic vision of the Third Republic, especially after the Dreyfus affair, he sometimes despaired of its praxis: the pitched battles between spiritualism and laïcité, the alleged theoretical gulf between abstract individualism and various forms of solidarité or socialism, “the tumult, the violence, the incoherence, and the disastrous eloquence.”Footnote ⁹ As he wrote in a letter to his wife, “we must use the state of affairs in France as a training school in wisdom, meaning that we French must learn to live with fools without losing our heads. Difficult exercise.”Footnote ¹⁰ But unlike his fellow editors and friends at the Revue de morale et de métaphysique, and sometimes to their consternation, Halévy turned to an ever greater elaboration of English social and political history in order to induce the kind of measured and moderate behavior that might constitute wisdom in French public life.

English history appealed to Halévy on two levels. First, more fully than any other nation, England had undergone the industrial transformation that underlay many of the conflicts in modern politics, conflicts that were accommodated in a rich and instructive reform tradition. Second, Halévy implicitly saw this English history, especially the period from 1776 to 1832, as a road not taken. It was a parallel universe in which to explore the legacy of France's democratic foundation without having to deal with its traumatic revolutionary lesions, lasting wounds that only made a complex history more difficult to parse. In the telling words of François Furet, he saw in the world of English reform a French revolution à l’anglaise.Footnote ¹¹ The connections and contradictions of modern reform, so Halévy reasoned, were more perceptible in English politics than in the stark confrontations and periodic contortions of French political life. In an 1898 letter to Célestin Bouglé, he notes, “at this date [around 1825] the principles of the French Revolution were certainly not posed in as absolute and systematic a manner as were the principles of philosophical radicalism in England.”Footnote ¹²

Halévy's analysis of philosophical radicalism in England, then, was meant as a political intervention—however roundabout. His hope was to encourage a more progressive politics in which intractable conflicts, especially around social justice, could be negotiated and blunted; to bring a sense of the possible to the polarized discourse around democratic reform; to show how a moderate and stabilizing liberty could accompany even a politics in which reformers were doctrinaire in the extreme. But this lesson would be gained only by a patient detour through foreign territory. A 1908 review of Albert Schatz's L’individualisme économique et social suggests why Halévy was loath to map the contradictions of modernity on his home ground.Footnote ¹³ Schatz's intellectual history, Halévy charged, was defective because it vacillated between offering partisan definitions under the guise of scholarship and blurring the meaning of concepts and definitions in order to disarm opponents. Thus Schatz either constructs two grand armies of socialism and individualism, dragooning past thinkers into the uncomfortable role of a general staff, or reaches out to an unlikely ally like Auguste Comte to show that his work is well within the logic of individualism.Footnote ¹⁴ Schatz is captured by the partisan divisions of French politics even as he tries to transcend them. Halévy recognizes the solid erudition in Schatz's work, but argues that his real achievement is to reveal how impossibly confused and obscure (embrouillée) is the question. Rather than clarifying the contingent connections between rationalism (dirigisme, socialism) and individualism, he muddies the waters.

If Halévy's negative appraisal of Schatz's book reveals the dangers facing an attempt to address his political concerns on the terrain of French history, it does not follow that Halévy's alternative plan of a detour to the other side of the Channel was without its own risks. Those redirected travelers might never reach the proper destination and might get lost in foreign parts. Moreover, they might mistakenly conclude that Halévy was recommending imitation rather than attention to potentially analogous moderating factors in their own political milieu. It is true that Halévy exhibited what Stefan Collini has called “a reflective admiration for the achievement of peaceful political adaptation” in England.Footnote ¹⁵ It was this apparently authoritative sotto voce judgment by an impartial observer that would be so appealing to English readers taking stock of their achievements, as we shall see. But this measured admiration is not really the fully fledged “hum of satisfaction” with English history that is audible in his later histories of England.Footnote ¹⁶ In this early work, Halévy's critical distance from révolution à l’anglaise is more in evidence.

Halévy's deepest hope for La formation, then, was to educate his French contemporaries. But this does not mean that he did not wish to have, and to impress, an English audience. His long months of study and research in England made him increasingly at home in the English intellectual scene and he had begun to forge important connections with writers and scholars there. When he learned about Leslie Stephen's three-volume work on the English Utilitarians, which appeared just before his, he naturally feared that his own work would be eclipsed and therefore marginalized in English debate.Footnote ¹⁷ As the next section will show, this concern would prove unfounded. Halévy's first foray into English history would strike an immediate and resonant chord in English intellectual life.

ENGLISH ENTHUSIASM

As another of the contributors to this symposium has written, “La formation du radicalisme philosophique is considered, particularly in anglophone countries, as a classic that on the whole has aged well.”Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, this tribute understates the matter. In Britain La formation did not need to age well to be appreciated: it was hailed as a momentous achievement even before all three volumes had appeared.Footnote ¹⁹ And it certainly did not have to wait for its long overdue translation into English in 1928 to cement its status as a preeminent work of intellectual history.Footnote ²⁰ This favorable reception was due in no small part to the intellectual climate in England around the turn of the century; indeed, the materials for a positive reaction to Halévy's interpretation of philosophical radicalism were deeply embedded in British culture before the work appeared. The goal of this section is to describe the British attitude toward and interest in utilitarianism during this period, and to demonstrate why Halévy's first great work elicited such enthusiasm.

Even if Halévy's only goal had been to write a work of intellectual history that would catch the attention of the British intellectual public, he could hardly have alighted on a topic more congenial to his audience. The study of Bentham and his school was a well-trodden route for political and philosophical reflection in England in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²¹ A 1906 review of La formation opened by noting some of the numerous authors who “have dealt with the development of Utilitarian doctrine.”Footnote ²² The writers of a 1910 pamphlet for the Historical Association went even further in a survey of “Books on the Development of English Thought”: “The group of English thinkers whose ideas have attracted most attention from the historians of thought are the ‘utilitarian’ followers of Bentham.”Footnote ²³ To bear out this verdict, the compilers of the pamphlet made mention of three texts: La formation, Stephen's English Utilitarians, and C. M. Atkinson's Life of Bentham, the last of which, far from being a work of original research in its own right, drew liberally on the conclusions of and the material unearthed by Halévy. By limiting itself to these three works alone, the Historical Association's leaflet had vastly undersold its point.

For one, the writers for the Historical Association unaccountably omitted Dicey's Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (1905), which was commonly included with the trilogies of Stephen and Halévy as the third member of a triumvirate of great appraisals of Benthamism. A host of other texts were similarly left out. In the last third of the nineteenth century, studies in the history of philosophy of avowedly broader scope—such as Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers (1886), James Bonar's Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their Historical Relations (1893), and William Graham's English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine (1899)—had devoted sizable segments to utilitarianism. In the 1880s Alexander Bain had written biographies of the two Mills that were as much critical engagements with their ideas as they were chronicles of the happenings in their lives, and in a similar vein Halévy's friend Graham Wallas had composed a life of the famous radical reformer Francis Place in 1898. William Lecky's celebrated History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) offers eloquent testimony to the centrality of utilitarianism in the historiography of politics, ethics, and philosophy in this era: he began his two volumes with a chapter on the “Natural History of Morality” that contained seventy pages on “The Utilitarian School,” even though the subject matter quite obviously fell outside his stated chronological scope. In addition to all of these more or less “historical” treatments of utilitarian theory and reform, there was also an array of authors who addressed the subject in the nonhistorical way to which Halévy objected in his introduction to the first volume of La formation. Unlike Halévy, these writers analyzed philosophical radicalism as if it had entered the philosophic world “fully established” with a fixed body of doctrine, ignoring the process by which “many different theories came one after another to form an integral part of utilitarianism.”Footnote ²⁴ Finally, on top of all this activity in the British Isles, across the pond Cornell professor Ernest Albee had released in 1902 A History of English Utilitarianism that stretched from Richard Cumberland to Spencer and Sidgwick, and this text was itself an expansion on his 1897 dissertation-cum-monograph The Beginnings of English Utilitarianism.

Of this abundance of investigations into Benthamism and utilitarianism, perhaps the most remarkable from the perspective of Halévy scholarship is a book from 1899, C. B. R. Kent's English Radicals. While hardly an equal in substance and insight to Halévy, and less targeted in his narrative than Halévy would be, Kent can be seen as his precursor in one regard: Kent clearly, if less thoughtfully and self-consciously than Halévy, attempted to understand radicalism as both an intellectual and a political phenomenon, as a philosophical doctrine or set of doctrines as well as a party program and force for reform.Footnote ²⁵ Interestingly, Halévy may have been unaware of this text; at the least, he did not consider it worthy of inclusion in the bibliographies to the volumes of La formation.Footnote ²⁶

As this plethora of publications indicates, British audiences were ripe both for the subject matter and for the approach of La formation. True, much of what Halévy had done was new—his archival excavations and dating of Bentham's manuscripts, and his unfolding of the dialectic between the artificial and the natural identification of interests internal to philosophical radicalism, to take just two examples—but these were novelties within the well-recognized genre of historically minded assessments of utilitarianism.Footnote ²⁷ Halévy's British counterparts, it appears, wanted to grapple with utilitarianism as a historical, political, and philosophical phenomenon.

This vogue for discussion (especially historical or at least historically informed discussion) of utilitarianism drew its strength from two sources that were not just different, but diametrically opposed. The first was a sense of the discontinuity between the heyday of the Benthamite school and the political climate of Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Fabian Sidney Ball interpreted the near-simultaneous appearance of the retrospectives of Stephen, Dicey, Atkinson, and Halévy as signifying a national need to come to grips with the disappearance of a once-powerful tradition: “Taken together they read like the obituary notice of a system that has passed away.”Footnote ²⁸ Dicey's Law and Public Opinion exemplified in its purest form this interpretation of the last century of British history, for he enlisted what he thought to be the decisive shift away from “Benthamism” or “individualism” to an antithetical “collectivist” ideology in the final third of the previous century as a chief piece of evidence for his thesis about the interaction between legislation and public opinion. Dicey told a tale of the lamentable but more or less definitive supersession of the Benthamite outlook by a world view very hostile to its predecessor. Stephen's story, though less polemically or transparently than Dicey’s, was also fundamentally one of discontinuity between the era of Bentham and the century which had just been entered.Footnote ²⁹ One of the most controversial (and least compelling) of Stephen's theses—namely that J. S. Mill never, despite his own testimony to the contrary, broke out of the mold of orthodox Benthamism—rendered it difficult for him to see Mill's own career as exemplary of the gradual transition from and adjustment of Benthamism to the collectivist, new liberal, and idealist currents prevalent at the end of Stephen's life.Footnote ³⁰ Consequently, Stephen's English Utilitarians leaves the impression that the radicalism of Bentham and the two Mills did not belong to the late Victorian world in which it was written.

In classifying La formation with its English counterparts as another entry into the “passing-of-Benthamism” catalog, Ball had significant features of Halévy's history to draw upon. Was not the conclusion of La formation an elegy for a once potent but now defunct doctrine? Did Halévy not state clearly that by the mid-nineteenth century philosophical radicalism—that is, “Utilitarianism [when it] was an organized philosophy and not merely a current opinion”—had “spent its strength, in the history of English thought and English legislation”?Footnote ³¹ As Ball recognized, La formation often reads as if the people and opinions it is describing, however recent in the grand sweep of history, resided in a time of different circumstances, issues, and ideas.

From this perspective, the importance to readers of a work such as Halévy's was that it furnished a powerful lens through which to examine their present beliefs and practices by contrasting them with philosophical radicalism. What was essential about La formation, according to this point of view, was that it depicted a mode of thought different from the audience's own. This aspiration to offer alternatives to the views reigning in France (and, more generally, in Europe) during his lifetime motivated Halévy at every stage of his career, from the founding of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale to L’ère des tyrannies, and La formation was no exception. Indeed, Halévy's cardinal criticism of Stephen (similar to his criticism of Schatz) was precisely that Stephen did not keep his current preconceptions distinct from the utilitarian doctrine whose history he claimed to be telling, and that he therefore hindered the reader from comparing “with some impartiality” the “individualism of the classical utilitarians” with Stephen's own fashionable “sociological” commitments.Footnote ³² Though Halévy's compatriots by and large did not seize the opportunity given by Halévy to judge their beliefs against the psychology, jurisprudence, ethics, and political economy of the Benthamites, one way in which an English audience could and did understand La formation was as a portrait of a doctrine that, while a major contributor to the shaping of that present, had come and gone. A brilliant dissection of how the great minds of another England had once managed reform, Halévy's portrait could throw the new challenges facing contemporary England into relief.

But the widespread interest in the history of utilitarianism also derived energy from exactly the opposite outlook, namely from an impression of the continuity between the doctrines of the philosophic radicals and the political philosophy of the dawning century, or between the problems that confronted England then and now. The impression of continuity was explicitly the guiding principle behind Kent's English Radicals, and appears to be the dominant, though not explicit, orientation of John Maccunn's chapters on Bentham and J. S. Mill in Six Radical Thinkers (1907).Footnote ³³ From this perspective as much as from the former, Halévy's words would have been welcome. Did not his warning against the “illusion” that saw “in individualism a philosophical eccentricity, an opinion peculiar to a few theorists” amount to the lesson that “the whole of modern Europe,” “collectivist” as it may have become in many respects, was still operating within an intellectual tradition which Bentham, James Mill, and the political economists had helped to mold?Footnote ³⁴ Did not the very process by which the “contradiction between the two principles” of the artificial and natural identification of interests became “apparent to all men,” and which brought philosophical radicalism to an end as a coherent movement and doctrine, guarantee a lasting importance to radical ideas, as the opposed strands that had previously coexisted uneasily within the radical creed were taken up more self-consciously and balanced more deliberately by thinkers and politicians of various stripes?Footnote ³⁵ Had not Halévy, in elaborating the radical creed “in all its real complexity” and thus vanquishing the travesty of it as simply complacent hedonism or laissez-faire optimism, made it possible to perceive the momentum that classical utilitarianism/philosophical radicalism had itself supplied to the growth of two hallmarks of British politics at the onset of the twentieth century: the administrative state and the rise of a more “collectivist” public policy?Footnote ³⁶ Halévy's work, for all these reasons, was of evident value to those who felt that Bentham and company were still very much with them.

Indeed, the chorus of praise for Halévy's lucidity and philosophical acuity seems to have sprung largely from a sense that in his concentration on the philosophic radicals' ambivalence about the identity of interests he had cut to the heart of a deep and enduring political-philosophical problem. “The central question for the adherents of utility is that of the relation of the interests of the individual to the interests of the community. M. Halévy brings out the persistence of this problem, and the different ways in which it was sought to establish an ‘identity of interests’,” wrote W. R. Sorley, who was so struck by the framework established in La formation that he would return to it in his later discussion of the identification of interests in A History of English Philosophy (1920).Footnote ³⁷ Sidney Ball agreed that the “constant refrain of [Halévy’s] study”— the significance of the combination within philosophical radicalism of two distinct and opposing views regarding the alignment of the individual's interests with those of the whole society—was a problem for which no definitive solution had been found, and which no twentieth-century political thinker could avoid.Footnote ³⁸

In contrast to the directness with which Halévy homed in on the issue of the identification of interests, and the sensitivity with which he traced its adaptations and recalibrations throughout the development of Benthamism and classical political economy, Stephen's volumes, though of course highly praised, could appear diffuse, circumstantial, unphilosophical: “Mr. Stephen writes with the personal intimacy of a disciple . . . [He] has clothed the utilitarian doctrine in circumstances. M. Halévy has analysed and pursued its essential constituents with admirable lucidity”; “Mr. Stephen writes not so much the history of a philosophical doctrine as the history of a school or sect.”Footnote ³⁹ Stephen's great talent, as his English readers and Halévy knew well,Footnote ⁴⁰ was biographical, and though The English Utilitarians was full of cutting criticisms of his subjects’ weakest arguments and exposés of the “chinks in the Utilitarian armour,”Footnote ⁴¹ the closest thing to a fundamental, orienting theme or tension in Stephen's re-creation of utilitarianism was what one reviewer called his “utilitarian paradox—the indifference to history combined with the appeal to experience.”Footnote ⁴² In an England imbued with evolutionary perspectives and devoted to the “historical method,”Footnote ⁴³ Stephen's paradox, however, lacked the present significance of Halévy's dichotomy of methods for the identifications of interests, and instead seemed like a question decided long ago. Stephen did not strike readers as illuminating live philosophical and political problems of the first order. If Stephen was the great chronicler of radical personalities, Halévy was the great analyst of the radical doctrine, and what earned Halévy this credential was his ability to depict philosophical radicalism as riven by a still timely, indeed probably timeless, dilemma: how much did a liberal society need to privilege spontaneous free choice? How much did it need to guard against the potential imbalance of power that could arise from these choices by privileging a reformist role for the state?

Like the contrasting routes for bringing about the identification of interests analyzed in La formation, the two ways in which Halévy's study was understood and appreciated by his English contemporaries existed in a sort of creative equilibrium. They still do to this day. One of the great sources of La formation's staying power—and perhaps this is true of any great work in the history of political thought—is that it shows philosophical radicalism to be at once alien and familiar. Halévy reveals both that the Benthamites provided policies that were targeted to issues specific to their time and that were based on their own limited world view, and that their beliefs and conduct struck at the core of ever-pressing questions such as the relationships between philosophy and politics, the individual and the collective, the legal/administrative and the economic spheres, liberty and security, a narrow-minded and partial view of life and the “speculative equivalent of courage to dare to take an idea as the principle of all one's opinions and of all one's acts.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And it is this quality of fulfilling at once both of these tasks that has separated La formation from the host of studies on similar subject matter that the English intellect produced in this period.

We therefore suspect that the first wave of Halévy's British readers would not be surprised to learn that La formation had outlived the contending texts on utilitarianism and that it was still being read, profited from, and argued with over a century later. Despite the initial fear of the Atheneaum's reviewer that the competition of Stephen would make it “unlikely” that Halévy would “find many English readers,”Footnote ⁴⁵ within a decade of its appearance La formation was already being singled out for special status: “M. Halévy's exhaustive study” was “likely to establish itself as the classic exposition” of the creed; “Leslie Stephen's English Utilitiarians . . . should be read. But the best examination of the utilitarians and their philosophy is contained in Elie Halévy's La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By the time the English translation arrived, these early assessments had been completely borne out throughout the anglophone world, and Halévy had the field of the history of utilitarianism more or less to himself.Footnote ⁴⁷ If he no longer occupies an ascendant place as the interpreter of Bentham and Benthamism, his philosophic history is, at the least, the sole prewar document with which contemporary historians and political theorists interested in utilitarianism still feel the need to reckon.Footnote ⁴⁸

FRENCH FROIDEUR

If La formation struck an immediate chord in England, probing the fault lines in a retrospective debate over the development of the theory and practice of the liberal state, its fate in France was to be very different. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism was reprinted in English six times between the first English translation in 1928 and 1972. La formation du radicalisme philosophique was largely unavailable in French until 1995, when the Presses universitaires de France issued a critical edition in three volumes.

The publication of the PUF edition of La formation may be explained by the liberal turn in late twentieth-century French intellectual life; that is, by the growing eagerness to appropriate France's indigenous liberal tradition to illuminate the trajectory of democracy in a postcommunist world. At least part of the reason for reissuing the work also appears to have been a hope to facilitate cross-cultural discussions of Anglo-American liberalism, particularly the political theory of John Rawls. By the 1990s Rawls was well known in France, but the appreciation of his work was hampered by the inability of French audiences to decipher his protracted quarrel with utilitarianism. Why would he have engaged so extensively with such an interlocutor? Unlike its prominence in Anglo-American intellectual life, utilitarianism in France was (and is) either absent or used as a caricature to evoke the soullessness of modern life. As the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy put it in a postface to the PUF edition, “we know nothing about it because we don't want to know anything.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It was discovered only belatedly that France had produced a brilliant guide to this terra incognita. Elie Halévy, most famous in France for his later work on the history of socialism and for L’ère des tyrannies, had written a work on utilitarianism that was considered a classic in the anglophone world but was unknown in France.Footnote ⁵⁰

French indifference or hostility to utilitarianism is an artifact of the distinctive course of nineteenth-century French liberalism, which increasingly marginalized the disposition to cast liberal and democratic reforms in the language of utility. Thus a shared intellectual legacy from the Enlightenment was decisively rejected by its French heirs.Footnote ⁵¹ Lucien Jaume has pointed to the symbolic importance of Germaine de Staël's trenchant critique of Bentham in De l’Allemagne as a premonition of the shrinking discursive universe of French liberalism: “she closes the door in France to a very important path that will be at the heart of English liberalism . . . that is, utilitarianism as the theory and practice of the harmonization of interest.”Footnote ⁵² The aim of this section is to sketch the contours of this growing antipathy among those liberal and democratic reformers who, in England, formed a natural constituency for the ideas of Bentham and his school.

We note first the growing distaste for consequentialist rhetoric, immediately apparent in responses to Bentham's work in France. In 1802, Etienne Dumont published a three-volume French translation of a selection of Bentham's work, which largely created the systematic doctrine known as “Benthamism.”Footnote ⁵³ Dumont deliberately shaped his portrait to align Bentham with the moderate milieu in France during the Directory and Empire, the so-called “Idéologues” among whom he had many friends and connections. One finds in Dumont's introduction to the Traités de législations the same focus on the consequences rather than the inherent rightness of reforms, the same rejection of natural-rights rhetoric as unstable and incendiary, the same grandiose hopes for utility as the keystone to an overarching science of man, and the same emphasis on a particular psychology based on the association of ideas.Footnote ⁵⁴ But these close associations to Idéologue rhetoric were more hindrance than help to a dissemination of Bentham's ideas. Rather than seeing in a new utilitarian social science a neutral language that could advance the civil gains of the revolution and bring together parties of goodwill, readers more often associated consequentialist rhetoric with the delirium to foster the public good that had precipitated the drastic reforms of the early years of the Revolution or with the many subsequent episodes in which arbitrary measures were rationalized as necessary to the good of all. In light of the use of utilitarian rhetoric both to justify revolutionary terror and to excuse absolutist repression, what seemed most urgent to moderates, and what would capture many in the postrevolutionary generation, was a rehabilitation of spiritualism and rights talk.

Particularly significant in retrospect is the combined attack on Bentham by Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant.Footnote ⁵⁵ In separate influential works, they argued that utilitarianism was morally deficient because it could not adequately account for the depravity of revolutionary excesses (it seemed to imply that these moral abominations were mere errors in calculation). Moreover, utility provided only a fragile basis for law and rights, when the pressing need in France was to reinforce their stability and inviolability. Constant's understanding of the drawbacks of the language of utility is particularly telling, because in many ways his differences with Bentham and the Idéologues were not profound, and he continued to see them as political allies. In fact, he turned the utilitarian critique of natural rights on its head. While he thought it was true that proclaiming the natural rights of the citizen opened the way to uncertainty and differences of opinion, appealing to utility was yet less sure and more contentious. Who, Constant asked, could have confidence in a right against the government that was supported merely by the idea that it was “useful” that a person not be punished? To appeal to utility as the basis for codes of law would encourage arbitrary judgments and reckless change, rather than continuity.

A second difficulty in promoting utilitarianism involved the devalued currency of the philosophical and psychological theories with which it was associated. In the context of the early nineteenth century the followers both of Bentham and of the Idéologues yoked their use of utility as a consequentialist criterion in moral and public life to the legacy of Locke's Essay on Understanding as appropriated by Hartley and Condillac. In France the theory was known as sensationalism (soon to be disparaged as sensualisme). The hope, during the brief period in which this philosophical disposition was the official philosophy of France, was that the inducement of rational trains of ideas—that is, a prudent and enlightened self-interest—would create new social bonds that would replace religious superstition and the dead weight of custom. Even before the Concordat and the Restoration brought the return of a newly combative Catholicism, the educational projects of the Idéologues were perceived as flawed and futile. Unable to return to Catholic “mysticism” and bereft of a Protestant culture more hospitable to freethinking, most of the new generation turned for moral guidance not to religion but to philosophy of a different, nonutilitarian/nonsensualist sort, and in particular to the eclecticism of Victor Cousin.

Cousin's attack on the sensationalist basis of utilitarianism, linking it to moral confusion, anarchy, and instability, centered on its alleged faulty conception of the self—weak, wavering, and susceptible to reckless idealism or sordid materialism. His alternative method of “interior observation” was not without sharp critics, but Cousin was nevertheless a mesmerizing speaker and something of an entrepreneurial and organizational genius. As a member of the Council of Public Instruction, he was able to embed his alternative psychology and philosophy in the educational structure of nineteenth-century France. His so-called eclecticism thus became the foremost shaper of several generations of state-educated elites, who cut their teeth on a refutation of sensationalism and utilitarianism. It is telling that the liberal journal of opinion Le globe, which was the single most influential conduit for the ideas of English political economy in early nineteenth-century France, was edited by followers of Cousin, whose stated aim was to purge economics of “the utilitarianism of Bentham or the idéologie of Condillac.”Footnote ⁵⁶ They defended a rather extreme form of laissez-faire/laissez-passer that was also particularly hostile to social welfare measures based on the need to recognize the moral duty of each member of society to be responsible for his own autonomous self. Commitments to private property and legal rights needed something stronger than a utilitarian defense.

This is not the place to discuss the complex and distinctive path of economics as a discipline in France. We note merely that many writers on economics resisted the kind of abstract theorizing about want satisfaction and interest aggregation that has given utilitarianism its elective affinity with economics. Charles Rist—like Halévy something of a maverick in French progressive circles—wrote to Walras in 1906 that economics in France was “specific, descriptive, and literary, marked by a deep and general indifference toward any kind of theory or theoretical research.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Many have noted that a by-product of the often salutary reluctance to abstract economic life from other realms of social interaction has been a long refusal by French liberals to accept the economy as a social reality capable of illumination by a disciplined body of thought.Footnote ⁵⁸

Already suspect because of its consequentialism, sordid materialism, and association with a classical economic theory, utilitarianism had a final drawback: it was often perceived as indigestibly English. Whether enmeshed in the Anglophilia of the few or the Anglophobia of the many, discussions of utilitarianism often dwelled on its distinctively English pedigree. In contrast to Halévy's hope to exploit an analogy in which English developments were pregnant with subtle comparative lessons, Benthamism was frequently portrayed as a product of the peculiarities of the English race or as the result of a set of unique conditions inapplicable to France.Footnote ⁵⁹ These multiple repudiations of utilitarianism—from the liberal center as well as from the religious right and socialist left—established a pattern of antagonism in French intellectual life that was well entrenched by the end of the century. If one consults the entry in André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie for utilitaire, one reads that it applies to persons attached to what is utile or indicates one who professes utilitarianism as a philosophic doctrine: “consequently, almost always with a pejorative connotation: without loftiness of view, self-serving, or at the least too concerned with material advantages.”Footnote ⁶⁰ When Halévy published La formation between 1901 and 1904, these negative associations of “utilitarian” presented a major barrier to a general appreciation of his text.

Halévy himself appears to anticipate that his readers will need to suspend their preconceptions in order to understand his work. Pierre Bouretz speculates that he chose to present the second volume of La formation for his thèse de doctorat under the title La Révolution et la doctrine de l’utilité (1789–1815) because this discussion of interpretations of the French Revolution by thinkers like Mackintosh, Paine, and Price might dissipate the strangeness of utilitarianism for a jury of examiners unfamiliar with English philosophy.Footnote ⁶¹ It is also significant that the announcement in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale of the final volume of La formation (1904) contains a warning label. Halévy probably wrote and certainly vetted this notice of his work, which cautions readers that they will find that the epithets ordinarily affixed to utilitarianism—namely that it is hedonistic, sensualist, unscientific, and incoherent—are “half-true,” but only half.Footnote ⁶² This premonition that the complicated message of the text might be missed because of a general French prejudice against its subject matter appears to be borne out in the reviews.

In 1902 François Pillon, long-time editor of L’année philosophique reviewed the first two volumes of La formation, and in 1904 the third.Footnote ⁶³ Pillon was a neo-Kantian collaborator of Renouvier. As one might expect, his discussion of Halévy's work is admiring and flattering, although it consists almost entirely of long quotations from the work and paraphrases of his arguments, rather than analysis or real critical engagement with the text. Yet in both reviews Pillon ends with a reproach. In the first he notes that we do not need to follow out the evolution of the doctrine of philosophical radicalism to recognize that it rests on an insufficient and superficial psychology, that it is simplistic, and that it mutilates moral experience. The doctrine of natural rights, Pillon thinks, is quite obviously rationally superior and he wishes Halévy had said so more clearly. In reviewing the final volume on political economy, Pillon admonishes Halévy with failing to insist on the insufficiency of the doctrine of enlightened self-interest as a basis of economic science: Halévy should have argued more forcefully for the superiority of the principles of rational morality as the basis of political economy, i.e. an inherent respect for liberty, property, and contracts. Though Pillon's neo-Kantianism was premised on a rejection of the facile eclecticism of Cousin, here he channels a critique of English political economy that was first voiced by Cousinistes and repeated throughout the century.

If the reception by philosophers was meager and disappointing, the response of historians— at least in the one review that we could locate—was surprisingly unperceptive. In the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, Léon Cahen dutifully praises Halévy's lucidity and meticulous scholarship in original sources.Footnote ⁶⁴ But he seems to think that Halévy feels a fervent admiration for Bentham, and he reads the text as an attempted rehabilitation of Bentham and his school. Moreover, he accuses Halévy of being clear in outline but hopelessly confusing in detail, of losing sight of names, people, and even reality itself. The historian John Clive once praised Halévy's masterful ability to create suspense by posing questions that are answered only at the end of a lengthy journey through tracts of historical data, but Cahen clearly gets lost in the labyrinth and is left disoriented and confused by the attempt to apply Halévy's “dialectical method” to history.Footnote ⁶⁵

Halévy hoped to use the latent contradiction between the artificial identification of interests and the natural or spontaneous identification of interests to show that these intellectual constructions were illusions expressed in different vernaculars by social and political reformers in both England and France. While such illusions lay at the root of principled action, they also could lead to chaos and violence if unrestrained. He admired the historical trajectory of philosophical radicalism in part because he found within it the lesson that these two thought experiments —one leading to an omnicompetent rational state and the other leading to a society of sovereign individuals, what he called rationalism and individualism—could be held by the same people and peacefully combined in changing concrete situations. Although this account appeared lucid and persuasive to a generation of English intellectuals who saw themselves as negotiating a transition to a more collectivist future, it was too esoteric to be appreciated widely in a France that was unpersuaded that the language of utility held any lessons for them.

It is possible in retrospect to find Halévian fellow travelers in pre-World War I France: those who attempted to push political debate in the Third Republic away from entrenched partisan positions and towards an understanding of how the conflicts and inequalities thrown up by industrialization might be mitigated through political compromise and democratic discussion.Footnote ⁶⁶ But these were always voices on the margin. Indeed, the trajectory of Halévy's work imitated his own scholarly assessment of Bentham's early impact. An important element of La formation's reconstruction of Bentham's activity, and one that distinguished it from the rival accounts of Dicey and Stephen, was the argument that Bentham was bound to find his first admirers outside his native land. Perhaps Halévy was unconsciously identifying with his main character when he wrote that “historical circumstances demanded that he should turn for his audience to the public on the Continent. The state of opinion in England at the end of the eighteenth century was unfavourable to the success of Bentham's programme of reform.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The state of opinion in France a century and a quarter later was similarly unpropitious for Halévy's program of historical research—only the roles of the nations had been reversed. If Enlightenment France could comprehend Bentham better than Enlightenment England, turn-of-the-century Britain was much better prepared to value Halévy's project than the France of the Third Republic.

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If the original enthusiasm for La formation in England owed a great deal to the use of utilitarianism as a way of taking stock of the history and resources of British political thought and culture and to the ability of Halévy's text to illuminate this stocktaking, the coolness with which Halévy's history of philosophical radicalism was received in France must largely be attributable to the disrepute into which utilitarianism had fallen there. In contrast to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, where the study of Bentham and his school was a nuanced entrée into discussions of the political identity of a modern liberal state, in France “Benthamism” had come to exist primarily as a kind of caricature and whipping boy. To the English mind, Halévy's philosophically informed tour de force—both provocative and definitive—established him as a powerful guide to the meaning of the age. Halévy had gone the furthest down a road that many others had taken or tried to take. To the French mind, in contrast, Halévy's work was a quixotic journey; he may have travelled an impressive distance, but he had taken not merely the road less traveled, but a road that no one cared to use. And that made all the difference.