• 1 Mill, J.S.,‘Bentham’, in Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. A. Ryan (London, Harmondsworth, 1987) (...)
• 2 Ibid., p. 138.
• 3 Ibid., p. 139.
• 4 Ibid., p. 145.
• 5 Ibid., p. 140.
• 6 Ibid., pp.146-147.

1In his August 1838 article ‘Bentham’ for the London and Westminster Review, John Stuart Mill heralded Bentham as one of the great English minds of the age. Bentham was, Mill proclaimed, ‘among the great intellectual benefactors of mankind’, ‘the father of English innovation’, ‘the great critical thinker of his age and country.’1 But Bentham was also, in Mill’s opinion, no ‘great philosopher’.2 His approach to philosophical questions was narrow and inflexible. His method was unoriginal. And it was applied pedantically, rigidly, and obsessively. The result was a myopic and desiccated ‘moral system’ blighted by ‘interminable classifications’ and ‘elaborate demonstrations of the most acknowledged truths.’3 While this shortcoming was serious and damaging, it did not detract from the power of Bentham’s intellect, which lay in an ‘eminently synthetical’ mind that made ‘short work with the ordinary modes of moral and political reasoning.’4 Bentham was never satisfied with ‘allusions to reasons’ or ‘a summary appeal to some general sentiment of mankind, or to some maxim in familiar use’, and he treated them as ‘an attempt on the part of the disputant to impose his own individual sentiment on other people, without giving them a reason for it’.5 This was Bentham’s great strength. It was also his great weakness. His mind doubted all other modes of thought and was hostile to them. He ‘failed in deriving light from other minds’ and believed himself to be intellectually self-sufficient. This, Mill damning maintained, prevented him from seriously wondering and reflecting on ‘the whole unanalysed experience of the human race’.6

• 8 Ibid., p. 149.
• 9 Ibid., p. 150.

2Bentham’s deficiency of imagination restricted his knowledge of human nature. What knowledge he had of it was ‘wholly empirical; and the empiricism of one who has had little experience.’8 He denied ‘all that he does not see’, all those truths he did not recognise. And ‘the truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important.’ In Mill’s estimation, the effect on his utilitarianism was damaging. But it was not fatal. Mill went on to argue ‘Bentham’s non-recognition of [these truths] does not put them out of existence; they are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is reserved for us, to harmonize these truths with his.’9 What Mill did to harmonise those truths with Bentham’s utilitarianism is well-known. The distinction he drew between higher and lower pleasures, between the life of Socrates dissatisfied than the life of a fool satisfied needs no additional scrutiny. But the ‘comparatively easy task’ Mill reserved for himself, was deceptive in its simplicity. And it was one of Mill’s great failings not to recognise that. The ‘many and important’ truths of which he spoke were presented as universal. But many were themselves the invention of a ‘deficiency of Imagination’ that was Mill’s own.

• 10 J.R. [probably John Robertson] ‘Domestic Arrangements of the Working Classes’, The London and Westm (...)
• 11 Ibid., p. 456.
• 12 Ibid., p. 456.
• 13 Fetter, Frank, ‘Economic Articles in the Westminster Review and Their Authors, 1824-51’, Journal of (...)

3This article examines a particular ‘deficiency of Imagination’ that was at the heart of Mill’s and Bentham’s thought; a failing of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy. What Mill and Bentham took to be a ‘universal truth’ was the existence of profound inequalities and the inhuman conditions endured by the working classes. This unfortunate but altogether natural consequence of the development of industry and commerce was, according to Bentham and Mill, and to most political economists of the age, including James Mill, the price to be paid for wealth creation and the future benefits to be bestowed on humanity. Mill’s London and Westminster Review certainly acknowledged the high price to be paid. Its pages expressed empathy and feeling. It bemoaned ‘the crowded lands, courts, and alleys of a large town, whose every house is one unseemly den of squalid hunger, strife, envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness – these are the abodes in which poverty appears in her most fearful garb, surrounded by vice and every variety of misery.’10 It treated as tragic ‘a condition of misery, produced by constant dread of starvation, or in an unimproving condition, caused by apathy arising from hopelessness.’11 But it contended that poverty, heart-breaking as it was, was essentially transitory and would, when the working-classes grew out of their condition of ‘ignorance’, the consequence of a mindset and manners resistant to emulating the ‘elevated’ behaviours of the ‘enlightened’ classes whose financial success was proof of the rightness of their behaviour. In emulating the rich the working classes would ‘benefit morally’. The working poor in ‘beholding a higher standard of comfort than he himself enjoys, his reason will set to work – not enviously, to reduce the rich man to his own level – but hopefully to devise means of raising himself to the level of the rich man.’12 This remained Mill’s and the London and Westminster Review’s resolute judgement. In the words of Frank Fetter, Mill and the contributors to the Review maintained, ‘with surprisingly few exceptions, a consistent view on economic policy and an unwavering belief that the laws of political economy provided the proper guide for advancing the welfare of mankind.’13 Mill’s unyielding belief in the ‘laws’ of political economy were at the heart of his own myopia to philosophical questions and ‘non-recognition’ of important truths.

• 14 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. vii-viii.

4This deficiency of Mill’s and Bentham’s utilitarianism was identified a half century ago in Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971), where he observed how utilitarianism’s origins lay in ‘social theories’, and economics, and that it was conceived to ‘meet’ specific ‘needs’ and ‘wider interests’. Bentham and Mill were instrumental in fashioning utilitarianism ‘to fit into a comprehensive scheme.’ But this ‘scheme’, which emerged over time and in an ad hoc manner, was, in Rawls’s words, nothing more than ‘a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints.’14 And these intuitionistic constraints were a consequence of an unwavering belief in the truth of the so-called laws of political economy. For Rawls and much of liberal theory that would follow in the aftermath of Theory of Justice, the fundamental failing of both utilitarianism and intuitionism was their failure to prioritise the individual as the object (and subject) of moral consideration. But, as the Communitarian and socialist critiques of Rawls and the defenders of deontological liberalism have shown, their own versions of deontology are subject to the same critique Rawls addressed against utilitarianism, which is that they too are ‘circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints’, the constraints of liberal political economy. It is against this backdrop that this article explores how the work of one of Bentham’s little-known admirers and one of France’s neglected thinkers sought to free utilitarianism from the ‘intuitionistic constraints’ of liberal political economy, and through this, reworked utilitarianism, and political economy fundamentally, thereby rectifying the wrong of ‘non-recognition’ within utilitarianism and political economy. In this Bentham’s little-known admirer achieved what Bentham, Mill, and Rawls himself, could not achieve: the prioritisation of the individual as both subject and object of moral consideration.

• 15 Weil, Georges, ‘Les Mémoires de Joseph Rey’, Revue historique, 157 (1928) pp. 291-307.
• 16 Rey, Joseph, Adresse au Roi (Paris, 1832), pp. 3-4.
• 17 Rey, Joseph, Des bases de l’ordre social, I (Angers/Paris, 1836), p. 181.
• 18 Rey’s rethinking of the foundations of utility through a rethinking of psychology, paralleled Pierr (...)
• 19 Rey, J., Des bases, I, p. 184.

5Joseph Rey (1779-1855) undertook this important corrective work. As the Idéologue, Destutt de Tracy’s principal disciple, Rey was, between 1821 and 1826, a leading figure in London’s émigré community of French liberals and republicans. Bentham was at the centre of this world. And this article examines how Rey, in his intellectual engagement with Benthamite utilitarianism and the work of Robert Owen and the Owenites, uncoupled the idea of utility from a felicific calculus grounded in two key assumptions of liberal political economy: the idea of private property and that of the private accumulation of wealth. Rey’s uncoupling of utility from private property and private wealth accumulation was a direct response to one of those important truths to which Mill might have referred had he been more imaginative. This truth was that of the soul-destroying penury and hardship suffered by the working classes. And it was this that served as one of several steps in Rey’s reflections on the social and political upheavals that beset a new, industrial, and commercial, Europe.15 In his Adresse au roi of 1832, Rey made a direct appeal to Louis-Philippe to improve the condition of the working-classes and to reform industry.16 But this was one of many steps that Rey took in rethinking utility on an entirely different foundation. Rather than see ‘nature’s two sovereign masters, pleasures and pains’ as arising from a psychology that took as its starting point the individual, their labour and private property arising from it,17 he rethought that psychology.18 This involved his rejection of an artificial, imaginary, creation of a natural man who had certain ‘rights’ bestowed by nature, so-called, natural rights. Rey’s rejection of state of nature theories was the prerequisite to his rejection of the premises of liberal political economy, with its assumptions about private property as a condition of natural right, and imaginary of social man, whose social rights are corollaries of natural rights, and whose social condition is constructed out of an imaginary natural, individualised, condition. Instead, Rey presented the individual as a priori a social being. This was for Rey, as it was for Aristotle, the person’s natural condition.19 In reimagining labour, property, and wealth as expressions of human’s species essence, as expressions of their nature, they too were conceived to be a priori social, or common. Rey rethought the fundamental intuition underlying utilitarianism, which lay in private persons and private property. Through his reworking of the economic and social origins to utilitarianism, Rey sought to establish a firm foundation to utilitarianism and social order, that in satisfying human needs, was the consequence of a moral vision of the world in which individuals’ obligations to others were the a priori condition of being human.

• 20 Few scholars have given Rey’s work any attention. The first years of his intellectual biography are (...)

7The work of Joseph Rey (1779-1855) is not well known.20 Born into a modest middle-class family in Grenoble on 24 October 1779, Rey was, like so many of his generation, profoundly affected by his childhood memories of the French Revolution and these would have a profound bearing on his reflections and outwardly unconventional intellectual trajectory.

• 21 Tracy’s paternal affection for Rey is vividly conveyed in his letters. See Destutt de Tracy, Antoin (...)
• 22 ‘N’essayons d’abord qu’à bien consolider les bases de l’édifice ; mais que tout soit égal entre le (...)

8In 1802 Rey began studying law in Paris. He quickly fell under the spell of the leading Ideologue, Antoine Destutt de Tracy who became Rey’s mentor and protector, promoting his young amanuensis and playing a critical role in Rey’s first appointment to the judiciary.21 Rey became an assiduous and hardworking justice in the conquered territories of the Empire and united departments. Under the restored Bourbon monarchy, he became president of the court of Rumilly (Savoie), but he was never a friend of the Bourbons, and he warned Louis XVIII and his ministers against undermining the constitutional charter of 1814.22 When Napoleon returned to Paris in May 1815, the beginning of his Hundred Days, Rey declared his allegiance with a short pamphlet entitled Adresse à l’Empereur. This work, which was read widely and admired, offered a blistering attack on the Bourbons’ ‘despotisme militaire et ministériel’, and painted a picture of Napoleon as a founder of peoples, who, through the ‘power’ of his ‘genius’, was able, in Rey’s words, ‘to bring together in the shortest possible time the most varied phases of the whole of human history’. This encomium was also accompanied by an appeal: Napoleon’s greatness required he embrace the principles of reason and justice and adopt a moderate liberal constitution ‘founded solely on the eternal foundation of the greatest wellbeing of the governed.’ The Acte Additionnel, penned by Rey’s friend, Benjamin Constant, was the result.

• 23 Bourbon rule was re-established in France after Napoleon’s first fall from power on 3 May 1814. On (...)
• 24 Important works from this period include: Des bases d’une constitution ou de la balance des pouvoir (...)

9Louis XVIII’s second restoration resulted in Rey being removed from the bench.23 This ushered in a new period in Rey’s life, one devoted to theoretical reflection. He spent his time writing books on law.24

• 25 For the best book on nineteenth-century secret societies and the networks of conspirators see: Tard (...)
• 26 Guillon, Édouard, Les complots militaires sous la Restauration (Paris, Librarie Plon, 1895), pp.112 (...)
• 27 ‘Les privilégiés forment encore, sous le point de vue qui nous occupe, une dernière classe tout-à-f (...)
• 28 Ibid, p. 4.

10 At the end of 1810s, and in reaction to the White Terror, Rey founded the liberal group ‘Union’, a secret society along the lines of the Italian Carbonari, which could count on the support of the more famous liberal Société des amis de la presse.25 Rey and his Union championed the cause of the ‘general propagation of enlightenment and the just principles of social rights.’ In Paris the Union attracted to its ranks established liberals such as Lafayette, the duke d’Argenson, Dupont de l'Eure, the lawyer Odilon Barrot, the journalists and political economists Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, and the philosopher Victor Cousin. Rey’s place within the Union was important. The assassination of the Duc de Berry in February 1820 led to widespread repression and an immediate crack down on liberal opinion in France. Leading Doctrinaire liberals, such as Guizot and Prosper de Barante were dismissed from the Conseil d’État. Popular protests at the curtailing of press freedoms and other repressive measures were violently crushed.26 Rey was outraged by these developments and placed the blame for repression and social turmoil on the Bourbons and their supporters. In Quelle est la classe de citoyens le plus intéressée au maintien du gouvernement ? (1820) he accused Louis XVIII and his ministers of pursuing an agenda that was antithetical to the interests of the nation. ‘From that perspective that preoccupies us, the privileged form still a last and quite distinct class, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the preservation of any government which has regard only for those ill-fated with talent and virtue who work.'27 The Bourbons, he concluded, were out of touch and out of control: ‘les seigneurs et pour quelques ministres subalternes de leur anarchie, de leurs révoltes continuelles, de leurs illustres brigandages et de leurs chevaleresques atrocités.’28 Rey mobilised members of the Union to join with Bonapartists, republicans, radicals, and sympathetic French army officers to plot an armed uprising. He was one of the key conspirators. The insurrection, planned for 19 August, was foiled, and Rey was lucky to evade arrest. He fled France and after nearly a year on the run found refuge in London.

• 29 Lafayette raised enough to provide Rey with a 1200 francs annuity. Rey, Joseph, Mémoires, III, 16, (...)
• 30 Rey, J., Mémoires, III, 16, BMG, Mss. T.8938 ; William Effingham Lawrence to Jeremy Bentham, 3 Dece (...)
• 31 For more on these exiles and conspirators, see Isabella, Maurizio Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Em (...)

11Rey arrived in London in July 1821, and quickly became a key figure in a network of progressive thinkers and politicians who could count among their number John Bowring, Edward Blanquiere, and Bentham himself. Lafayette was important to this network. He raised money to support Rey;29 Bentham also supported him financially.30 This gave Rey the chance to devote time and energy to the cause of liberal internationalism, serving as an important intermediary between the Philosophical Radicals and French, Spanish, and Portuguese liberal exiles.31

• 32 Rey, Joseph, Lettres et billets reçus en Angleterre qui peuvent servir à mes mémoires. BMG, Mss. T3 (...)
• 33 Rey’s answers were important to Bentham’s Constitutional Code. See ‘Introduction’, in The Collected (...)
• 34 Rey, Joseph, Mémoires sur la Restauration. Conspiration du 19 août 1820 et ses conséquences, BMG, M (...)
• 35 Rey, J., Mémoires, III, p. 21.

12To Rey’s work among liberal exiles must be added his lectures on French law and judicial institutions.32 The course was popular with liberal and radical audiences in London and was helped by Bentham, who also opened his library to Rey. The debt was amply repaid by Rey who answered many of Bentham’s questions on French law.33 Rey’s lectures became his 1828 Traité des Principes généraux de droit et de la législation.34 Along with reflecting on French law, Rey participated in discussions of the Utilitarian Society where he met ‘the young John Mill’, and debated many topics with the Philosophical Radicals, including a subject dear to the contributors to the London and Westminster Review, ‘unlimited freedom of trade’.35

• 36 In the introduction to Traité des principes généraux Rey acknowledges the importance of his English (...)
• 37 Rey noted that ‘Bentham ne propose que le bonheur du plus grand nombre, tandis que je pense que la (...)
• 38 Rey, J., Quelle est la classe de citoyens le plus intéressée au maintien du gouvernement ?, pp.17-1 (...)
• 39 Rey, Joseph, Des institutions judiciaires de l’Angleterre comparées avec celles de la France (Paris (...)
• 40 Rey, J., Mémoires politiques, pp.18-19.
• 41 Weill, G., ‘Les mémoires de Joseph Rey’, p. 304.

13Rey used his time in London productively. He wrote a parallel work to the Traité. This was Des institutions judiciaires d’Angleterre comparées à celles de la France (1828). Both the Traité and Des institutions were important contributions to penal, civil, and constitutional law. And both owed a profound debt to Bentham who enthusiastically welcomed the publication of Des institutions, describing it as a ‘parallel view’ to his own. 36 In Traité Rey drew extensively on Bentham. At the same time, he departed from Bentham’s principle of utility by giving it a more egalitarian interpretation, arguing that Bentham’s formulation of the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ was inadequate to achieving social harmony and that social peace could not be achieved without attending to the welfare of all members of society.37 This departure from Bentham’s utilitarianism was the result of many factors. Well before Rey arrived in England, he highlighted the urgency of improving the situation of the poor. His 1820 pamphlet Quelle est la classe de citoyens le plus intéressée au maintien du gouvernement? stressed how important this was morally and politically: ‘Nous voudrions accorder la plus grande influence politique à la classe des nécessiteux par infortune ou à celle des individus qui n’ont que le strict nécessaire, par cela seul que ces deux classes ont le plus haut intérêt à la conservation d’un gouvernment.’38 A second factor was Rey’s experience as a refugee, including his own experience as trying to establish himself in London as minor distiller driven out of business by a powerful commercial rival.39 These experiences left a deep impression on him.40 Third, was the extreme poverty he saw while living in London. A fourth factor was Rey’s regular attendance of meetings of the Co-operative Society and his reading Owen’s work, notably A New View of Society. The many workers he conversed with in meetings of the Co-operative Society and what he assimilated in reading Owen, fundamental principles of ‘community’ and ‘equality’, were decisive to helping him find answers to some of Europe’s most pressing problems, particularly those that fell under the catch-all expression, ‘the social question’.41

• 42 Rey, J. Traité, pp. 235-6.

14Rey’s attendance at both the Utilitarian and the Co-operative Societies landed him at the centre of an animated debate between the Philosophical Radicals and the Owenites. Rey’s adherence to the underlying epistemology of Idéologie, with its fundamental affinity with utilitarianism, meant that he defended those aspects of Bentham's thought he believed worth defending. According to Rey, the great value of Benthamite utilitarianism was two-fold. Its strengths lay in its methodological and epistemological rigour. Methodologically, its great philosophical and social purpose was to disperse the ‘clouds of mysticism’ that enveloped legal and political thought, a judgement Mill shared as his 1838 essay on Bentham makes clear. Utility was also firmly rooted epistemologically in objective criteria of pleasures and pains. But whereas Bentham felicific calculus was the sum of individual pleasures and pains, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Rey’s experiences, his witness to crippling poverty and conversations with disaffected workers, and conviction in Owen’s co-operative ideas, caused him to define utility differently, as the ‘happiness of the greatest number, and of all, if possible, of every individual’. With this new definition, Rey believed he improved on Bentham’s utilitarianism by reconciling individual and social activity, achieving, what he thought was beyond the reach of Benthamite utilitarianism, the goal of social harmony.42

• 43 Rey, J., Des institutions judiciaires, p. 2.
• 44 Tristan, Flora, Promenades dans Londres (Paris, 2008), p. 56.

15Rey’s Des institutions judicaires de l’Angleterre comparées avec celles de la France united three intellectual currents that came to define all his later work: Idéologie, utilitarianism, and co-operation. Des institutions was based on extensive observations of the ‘economic and moral state’ of the English people.43 And what he witnessed was distressing. Rey observed grinding poverty and confounding ignorance, and he attributed these conditions to soul-destroying employment workers described to him. They recounted dangerous, nauseating, foul, repulsive, and deafening work; strenuous and unyielding levels of exertion; and repetitive and mentally enervating tasks. These conditions were the product of a division of labour that, as Flora Tristan, who in 1840 travelled through England, described as having ‘annihilated intelligence, to reduce man to a cog of machines’.44 Rey, who observed this ‘annihilation’ of intelligence, reflected on its psychological effects. What he hypothesised had a direct bearing on his reworking of utilitarianism.

• 48 Rey, Joseph, Lettres sur le système de la coopération mutuelle et de la communauté de tous les bien (...)
• 49 Ibid.,p. 10.
• 50 Ibid.,p. 15.
• 51 Ibid.,p. 8.

20The Lettres gave a forensic analysis of industrial society, identifying its ruinous vices and their effects. Rey identified ‘the spirit of exclusive INDIVIDUALITY’ as the main corrupting principle of industrial society.48 According to Rey exclusive individuality encompassed the ‘deadly principle of competition’, which was at the heart of all social interactions and justified the consequence of private property and wealth: ‘extreme inequality in the distribution of goods (...)[and] the accumulation of wealth by a small number of individuals.’49 The injustice of the spirit of individuality was aggravated by the bewildering paradoxes it engendered. On one hand, it generated immense productive forces and unseen material abundance. On the other, that wealth, accumulated by ‘a small number of individuals’, was placed beyond the reach of those who laboured to produce it. While the rich and powerful lived lives free of want, the labouring-classes inhabited a world of servitude and unspeakable poverty. The profound social imbalance engendered by the spirit of exclusive individuality was mirrored in an extreme economic imbalance, with scarce resources being directed toward the production of luxuries and warfare. Humans and capital were put to unproductive and inefficient use. And the political imbalance was equally extreme, with laws and force being used to impose and maintain what was a manifestly unjust order. In Rey’s words, the spirit of exclusive individuality created a society whose fundamental characteristic was the ‘systematic organisation of disorder’.50 And the incomprehensibility of this reality was made to appear entirely normal by the language of political economy and jurisprudence, which, through a fiction created by a rhetoric of ‘naturalness’, instilled, in subjects and lawmakers alike, a ‘mechanical veneration’ for established practices and institutions. Against this backdrop, Rey presented co-operation as the basis for ‘true social order, that is to say, the only one that can give man in society the greatest possible sum of happiness.’51 He enumerated the fifteen aspects of Owen's system that, when combined, yielded the ‘greatest possible sum of happiness.’ And he grouped these elements under two broad headings: headings that revealed Rey’s methodological debt to Bentham. The first was the economic and the social. The second was the political and moral.

• 52 For a detailed critique of the idea of capacity see Frobert, Ludovic, Vers l’égalité ou au-delà? Es (...)
• 53 Rey, J., Lettres, p. 40.

21Under the economic and social, Rey stressed the benefits of a community in which the ownership of land and ‘instruments and capital’ were held in common. Common ownership yielded a more efficient use of resources and guaranteed the equal enjoyment of goods. It also – and this was fundamental to his argument – treated labour equally, effacing the kind of hierarchy between intellectual and manual labour that was pregnant in the idea of capacity or ability, central to liberal political economy. 52 In treating labour equally and common to community, Rey removed one of the most serious impediments to treating all individuals equally – to prioritising the individual as the object (and subject) of moral consideration. Rey’s ‘communauté de jouissance des produits basée sur l’égalité’ established mutuality between equality and community. He summarised how individual, and community were reconciled: ‘It seems to me beyond doubt that a system of mutual co-operation conjoined to community and the equal enjoyment of goods, would destroy the germ of the divisions born of the state of individual competition the clashing of efforts in production and the laying of claims to enjoyment.’53

• 54 Ibid., p. 33.

22Under the political and moral, Rey emphasised just how much of a departure from Europe’s established orders, from the ‘systematic organisation of disorder’, Owen’s system of co-operation was. The equal treatment of labour removed the obstacles to ‘unlimited freedom’: amour-propre and with it, domination. The equal treatment of labour, the contented and gratified conditions that arose out of meaningful work, laid the foundation to a genuinely ‘co-operative community’, a community with an expansive understanding of individual and political liberties, including freedom of thought, expression, association, participation, deliberation, and self-governance. 54

• 55 Rey, Joseph, De la méthode Jacotot (Paris/Grenoble, 1828).

23One key element to Rey’s reflections on Owenism was education. To forge a genuine co-operative community, a community of equals free of the hierarchies spawned by amour propre, education had itself to be understood and practiced as a collaborative process of discovery defined by a non-hierarchical relationship between student and teacher. Rey’s thoughts on equality and the psychology of pleasure as the condition to emotional and intellectual harmony and wellbeing shaped his understanding of learning as a collaborative activity. This was another reshaping of Idéologie and utility. Departing significantly from Bentham’s 1817 reflections in Chrestomathia, Rey’s thoughts on education as a collaborative process of discovery, of intellectual, psychological, and emotional growth, of human relating and intersubjective union, informed all his writings and projects on education, particularly another work from that prolific year of 1828: De la méthode Jacotot.55

• 56 Rey, J., Adresse au Roi (Paris, 1832), p. 12.
• 57 Considerant, Victor, Les deux communismes, observations sur la lettre de M. Rey (Paris, 1847), p. 1 (...)
• 58 Rey, J., Des bases de l’ordre social, II, pp. 180-3, pp. 186-7.

24By the time Rey published Des bases de l’ordre social, he had achieved a new and altogether distinctive way of thinking about the constellation of ideas that would, through the early decades of the nineteenth century crystallise in the ideologies of liberalism, republicanism, and socialism. Des bases de l’ordre social was ambitious in scope and intent. It paved the way to a deep rethinking of human relations and social organisation that was wide-ranging and profound. It not only challenged to the core the liberal order of the July Monarchy, dominated by Doctrinaire liberalism and the philosophy of eclecticism, it also questioned fundamentally the entire corpus of French socialist and republican thought, which itself was in open conflict with the Louis-Philippe’s government.56 Though the compass of this article does not permit us to discuss in minute detail Des bases de l’ordre social, it is worth reflecting on just how remarkably ambitious this work was in scope and intent. First, it resurrected the ancient concept of hospitality and made it a central idea with an altogether modern reworking, reflecting on how it was the guiding principle of human relations in a community of equals living in a spirit of benevolence.57 This was Rey’s hopeful alternative to the hostile reality of the spirit of exclusive individuality and its accompanying ‘deadly principle of competition’, which, secondly, Rey dissected and examined forensically. Third, Rey’s meticulous analysis of the principles of political economy led him to distance himself more comprehensively from Bentham than in previous writings. Bentham’s felicific calculus, the aggregation of pleasures and pains, was, as Mill himself pointed out, derived from an intelligence that believed itself to be self-sufficient but was utterly cut off from most human experience. This total absence of sympathy with, in Mill’s words, ‘the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature’ was fatal to Bentham’s utilitarian calculus and disqualified it from being considered a moral theory but qualified it to be the moral fiction and palliative to industrialists’, political economists’, and legislators’ acceptance of profound inequalities and their acquiescence to the plight of the poor.58 As Rey observed:

• 60 Marx, Karl, ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’, in Early Writings, ed. Luci (...)
• 61 Ibid., p. 261.

25With these remarks Rey not only exposed the fiction of political economy, but he also anticipated, by almost a decade, Marx’s critique of James Mill. Marx’s highlighted just how the political economy’s ‘abstract laws’ were ‘no more than an abstract, contingent and one-sided moment’ to ‘the real movement’ of ‘fluctuation’ and ‘disparity’,60 and revealed how this was one of many expressions of political economy’s alternative reality, in which concrete human relations are abstracted and reflected to individuals as what is real. Reality became fiction, and fiction, the new reality. In his critique of James Mill, Marx summarised it thus: ‘Since in the process of exchange men do not relate to each other as men, things lose the meaning of personal, human property.’61

• 62 ‘Une unité parfaite d’être et d’action, quelle que soit l’origine des phénomènes qu’on veut exprime (...)
• 63 Rey, J., Des bases de l’ordre social, I, pp. 28-29.
• 64 Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added.

26Rey tackled political economy’s fictions from a different angle than Marx. Rather than engage directly with the works of political economists, as Marx had done, Rey showed epistemologically and ontologically how our sense perceptions and the way we make sense of reality worked. He observed that there was, in his words, a ‘perfect unity of being and action, whatever the origin of the phenomena one wishes to express; thus, in any perceived sensation, there is always a moral effect, that is to say an intellectual or affective phenomenon, while, on the other hand, in any sensation, whatever its situation and its cause, there is always a physical effect, since there is always a physical organ that is affected.’62 What he showed was how intimately linked the moral and physical were. This demonstration served a triple purpose. The first was to show how this relation between the moral and physical was key to ideas and the science of ideas, or ideology. As he noted ‘we must recognize the necessity of basing the science of our sensations on a good theory of our ideas. Ideology, or the science which aims to observe the origin and development of our ideas, must also precede the establishment of any rational system of social organization.’63 The second was to show how the actions of the legislator, whose function was, according to Rey, ‘to give a certain direction to the actions of the individuals who make up the Society … to direct human actions rationally’ had to ‘know the principles of the science which is sometimes called economics (…) and often also political economy, but whose general object is to consider the actions of man in society, in relation to a production of well-being.’64 The third was to show how, the ideas of political economy rested on false premises, and that it gave an incorrect impression of reality. Political economy perverted our ideas and their development, such that our intelligence presented to us an entirely alternative, false, reality from our actual lived experience. And this, as we have already seen, had, according to Rey, the most destructive consequences on humans. Showing how this manifested itself was the domain of physiology. As Rey noted: ‘PHYSIOLOGY being the science of observation of ALL the phenomena of life, it is obvious that it must include that of intellectual, moral and economic phenomena, as well as of all the other consequences of our organism.’

• 65 Rey, J., Mémoires sur la Restauration. p. 28.

28What Rey achieved in Des bases de l’ordre social was revolutionary. The work proved to be a major intervention in the struggles that came to characterise the ideological formation of nineteenth-century France and Europe, the moment when the great ideological categories of modernity were being forged. And it sought to bridge a widening gap between the competing variants of liberalism and socialism, to reconcile individual freedom and self-determination with community. His revolutionary transformation of utilitarianism and Idéologie were critical to his fundamental reshaping of political economy, transforming it from the ‘dismal science’ of ‘laisser-souffrir, laisser-mourir’, to the authentic science of the ‘production of well-being.’ A science that would see, as he put it, a ‘sweet harmony spread over all the members of the magnificent family, united forever by the bonds of love, of the general fraternity’.65