Page 24 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

UTILITARIANISM AND ITS OTHERS

By a strange irony, most university courses in cultural theory care-
fully manage to ignore what is almost certainly the single most
influential such theory available to our culture: utilitarianism.
Historically, this was the first of all modern cultural theories,
chronologically prior to the whole range of competing successor
paradigms. But it almost certainly still represents the preferred
paradigm of the vast majority of members of the contemporary
business and political elite—as distinct from the cultural elites—
and, as such, exercises an enduring influence over a great deal
of cultural policy formation. We use the term ‘utilitarianism’ to
denote a view of the social world as consisting, ideally or fact-
ually, 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 organised so as to least inhibit the
individual in pursuit of his or her pleasures, one in which markets
are as freely competitive as possible, and in which governments
exist only to establish the legal framework within which such
markets can freely function. It is a view that has its origins in
seventeenth-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 philo-
sophical systems of David Hume (1711–76), through to the
political economy of Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Ricardo
(1772–1823), and on to the self-proclaimed utilitarianism of
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73).
This is an overwhelmingly British intellectual tradition, but
one that certainly found echoes in eighteenth-century French
thought. Its political correlate is liberalism, in the nineteenth-
century sense of the term (which is how the term still tends to
be used in contemporary French and German discourse). Utili-
tarianism provided the single most powerful justification for
the forms of social organisation characteristic of modern capitalist
society: that they guarantee the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. It provided the intellectual underpinnings for
the discipline of economics, especially as it is practised in the

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