Page 17 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

Chapter 1
UTILITARIANISM

The cultural contradictions of utilitarianism
By a strange irony, most courses in cultural theory taught in British
institutions of higher education manage carefully to ignore what is
almost certainly the single most influential such theory available to
our culture, that is, utilitarianism. Historically, utilitarianism was the
first of all modern cultural theories, chronologically prior to the whole
range of competing successor paradigms. But it also almost certainly
still represents the preferred paradigm of the vast majority of members
of the contemporary business and political élite, and, as such, exercises
an enduring influence over a great deal of cultural policy formation.
Utilitarianism has typically been the intellectual property, however,
of organic rather than traditional intellectuals, whereas it has been
the latter who have typically organized the teaching of cultural theory
in both the new and the old universities. Hence the peculiar mismatch
by which an actually dominant paradigm is persistently misrepresented
as either marginal, archaic, or even simply non-existent.
But what exactly is utilitarianism? I mean by the term
“utilitarianism” a view of the social world as consisting, ideally or
factually, in a plurality of discrete, separate, rational individuals,
each of whom is motivated, to all intents and purposes exclusively, by
the pursuit of pleasure (or “utility”) and the avoidance of pain. The
good society is thus one organized so as least to inhibit the individual
in pursuit of his or her (but normally his) pleasures, one in which
markets are as freely competitive as possible, and in which
governments exist only so as to establish the legal framework within
which such markets can freely function. It is a view which has its
origins in 17th century England. Its evolution can be traced from the
social contract theories of politics propounded by Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), and the empiricist

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