The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism

In its original French La Forrnation du Radicalisme Philosophique en Angleterre appeared in three volumes between the years 1900 and 1903 (one volume dealing with the youth of Bentham from 1776 to 1789, another with the growth of the utilitarian doctrine from 1789 to 1815, and a third with the history of philosophic radicalism from 1815 to 1832): in the English translation it was published in 1928. It was the work of a philosopher and a historian, both in one. What was philosophic was the lucid analysis and the just appreciation of ideas. What was historic was the patient research (not least in the mass of Bentham's manuscripts) which went to the writing of the work. But it was not only the philosopher and the historian that went to the writing of The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism: it was also the economist. One of the great merits of the work is the connexion which it establishes between the philosophy of Bentham and the economic theory of Ricardo, the Mills and McCulloch. It is still another merit (a merit which also appeared in other phases of his thought and his investigation, as, for instance, in his lectures on the history of Socialism) that he patiently and conclusively showed the connexions and interactions between the thought of France and the thought of England: how Locke and Hume had acted on France, and how, in return, the ideas of the great French thinkers of the latter half of the eighteenth century had reacted on England. –Ernest Barker, The English Historical Review, 1938