This chapter probes the relative absence in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century India of the style of essay that predominated in Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century. Rather than the heterogeneous, speculative, provisional, unmethodical, Montaignian essay, the essay that appeared in India at this time was more structured, more critical, and leaned more heavily into history. This chapter argues that the shape the essay took in India was the outcome of three factors: the condescension of colonial thinkers such as James Mill, who dismissed Indians as outside reason; the Victorian form of the essay that was transplanted to the subcontinent; and an indigenised version that transformed the essay into a vehicle for the writing of histories that was sweeping the subcontinent and was a cornerstone of the nationalist, anti-colonial struggle.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

A study of James Mill’s engagement with Plato. It focuses on two hostile reviews of Thomas Taylor’s Neoplatonist Plato, one published by him in 2004 in The Literary Journal, a short-lived periodical that he himself edited, and another in 2009 in The Edinburgh Review, a much more prestigious and enduring forum of opinion, for which he wrote regularly for some years. It celebrates Mill as a pioneer, who had the good fortune to make his first approach to Plato from the vantage point of the scepticism of Cicero’s Academica, and very likely exerted influence on the interpretation of Plato in George Grote’s great study of 1865, which portrays an exploratory thinker, not a system builder.

Barrell concludes by arguing that the utilitarians’ conscription into an ahistorical Enlightenment is doubly misconceived, first, because they opposed only the crudest forms of historical enquiry, and, second, because the eighteenth-century Enlightenments were neither systematically ahistorical nor neatly superseded by Romantic, organic, and historicist ideas. If, therefore, these new historical perspectives were both products and unruly offshoots of Enlightenment, then the utilitarians’ intellectual history assumes a more fluid shape. This new shape, Barrell suggests, may force us to rethink the utilitarians’ place within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century; the history of historical writing; and the history of philosophy.

This chapter examines contemporary responses to utilitarianism as a political tradition, and, contrary to accepted wisdom, argues that Bentham’s theory of utility was circumstantially and thus historically relative. It asks why Bentham has been perceived as both an ahistorical and an antihistorical thinker, despite his engagement with the ‘Enlightened’ historicisms of the eighteenth century: with Montesquieu, Barrington, Kames, and others. While he denied that history possessed an independent value that could determine or even effectively structure politics, we should not mistake these arguments for an unwillingness to contemplate politics historically, or to make occasionally significant concessions to time and place. Bentham’s point, rather, was that historical truths were categorically distinct from philosophical ones, and that sciences historiques observed the past while sciences philosophiques appraised it. The chapter also addresses Bentham’s overlooked work as a ‘historiographer’ who performed recognisably historical tasks, including the examination of evidence and the passing of historical judgements