Bentham and the Arts

The volume engages with an impressive range of canonical and contemporary primary andsecondary scholarship on Bentham and aesthetics, and makeswonderful use of manuscript material only recently published in addition to avariety of sources in the Bentham corpus, and it is well schooled in historicaland contemporary theory and criticism beyond Bentham.Offers a range of voices all dedicated to re-visioning Bentham’s aesthetics,and together makes great use of the remarkable materials on taste and sexonly recently published by the Bentham Project at UCL. Benthamand the Arts breaks with the still-common view of Bentham as comparativelyilliberal precursor to the classically liberal John Stuart Mill. This collectioneffectively destroys that image and constructs another. Bentham comes throughfor the most part as a strikingly libertarian and egalitarian thinker with acoherent and original sense of the place and status of the arts in moderndemocratic society.