Epilogue; or, Burke and Bentham
摘要
This chapter is an “epilogue” rather than a conclusion, where, instead of some key words taking the stage, two famous authors, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, are summoned as proponents of two contrastive philosophies. Burke castigated France under the “Jacobins” for disrupting the moral framework of society, economy, and politics. To Bentham, the intrusion of morals into economics, which this book charted all the way from Mandeville to the Abolitionists, was an outdated superstition that needed to be thrown overboard. The unbridgeable rupture between the maximalist conception of morality held by Burke and the minimalist moral calculus of Bentham serves both as a dead end of the discursive practices described in this book and as a signpost to later developments.