Imagining Interest in Political Thought

Engelmann Stephen G. Engelmann

Description

Imagining Interest in Political Thought argues that monistic interest-or the shaping and coordination of different pursuits through imagined economies of self and public interest-constitutes the end and means of contemporary liberal government. The paradigmatic theorist of monistic interest is the English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose concept of utilitarianism calls for maximization of pleasure by both individuals and the state. Stephen G. Engelmann contends that commentators have too quickly dismissed Bentham's philosophy as a crude materialism with antiliberal tendencies. He places Benthamite utilitarianism at the center of his account and, in so doing, reclaims Bentham for liberal political theory.Tracing the development of monistic interest from its origins in Reformation political theory and theology through late-twentieth-century neoliberalism, Engelmann reconceptualizes the history of liberalism as consisting of phases in the history of monistic interest or economic government. He describes how monistic interest, as formulated by Bentham, is made up of the individual's imagined expectations, which are constructed by the very regime that maximizes them. He asserts that this construction of interests is not the work of a self-serving manipulative state. Rather, the state, which is itself subject to strict economic regulation, is only one cluster of myriad "public" and "private" agencies that produce and coordinate expectations. In place of a liberal vision in which government appears only as a protector of the free pursuit of interest, Engelmann posits that the free pursuit of interest is itself a mode of government, one that deploys individual imagination and choice as its agents.

Sujets

• Economic history

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384946
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Imagining Interest in Political Thought

Imagining Interest in Political Thought

Origins of Economic Rationality

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2003

Stephen G. Engelmann

∫2003 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For my mother and father, and for Sophia

3

77

141

5

∏

≥

The Economic Polity

151

Imagining Interest

The Public Interest

1

x

7

i

Contents

1

∞

Against the Usual Story

Introduction

≤

Acknowledgments

Virtuous Economies

State Rationality

8

4

Index

185

104

Notes

π

∂

∑

Acknowledgments

The debts I have incurred in writing this book are enormous, and will never be paid. They go back to kitchen talk with Florian Bail, and to my time at Reed College and Queen’s University, where teachers and fellow students pushed me to keep learning. I was first given the freedom to explore many of the book’s themes at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Richard Flath- man, the very best advisor and interlocutor one could hope to have. Kirstie McClure prodded me to improve my historical and theoretical skills—as well as my writing—while William Connolly, J.G.A. Pocock, and Ali Khan provided additional guidance. Other early helpers included Lanfranco Blanchetti, James Crimmins, Kaveh Ehsani, Charles Euchner, John Maltese, Rina Palumbo, and Meg Russett, as well as John Guillory, David Harvey, and the late Sharon Stephens. Arguments were later tested at conferences in the United States and Canada, and in seminars and workshops at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago. Chapter 4 appeared inUtilitas13:4 (November 2001). I am grateful to Yoshio Nagai and his colleagues from the Japanese Society for Utilitarian Studies for their invitation to present a draft of chapter 5; ideas for chapter 7 were developed at the invitation of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies Bentham Seminar at University College London. Philip Schofield and the sta√ of the Bentham Project at UCL are wonderful hosts. I am indebted to conversations with them, and to responses from numerous discus- sants and audiences. The book itself could not have been written without the