First published in 1977 this volume challenges the accepted interpretations of Bentham's political thought and in particular the landmark criticism by John Stuart Mill and Elie Halevy, the author consulted the extensive manuscript collections left by Bentham to the University of London and the British museum in the preparation of this volume.

Challenging the accepted interpretations of Bentham's political thought and in particular the landmark criticism by John Stuart Mill and Elie Halevy, the author consulted the extensive manuscript collections left by Bentham to the University of London and the British museum in the preparation of this volume.
Available on its own, or as part of the 9-volume reissue of the classic Political Thinkers series.

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous-and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Regime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

"Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman" investigates cruelty and its contribution to concepts of the human in the Enlightenment culture of the eighteenth century. It reveals the way that cruelty moved from being an inherently inhuman act that undermines the humanity of the perpetrator to an eminently human trait stemming from human agency and reason. Mindful of the widespread critique of the Enlightenment and its conception of the human, James A. Steintrager draws from original sources in art, philosophy, and literature to illustrate the shifts and turns taken by the concepts of cruelty and moral monstrosity.His discussion ranges from ethical philosophy, and how it elaborated a notion of moral monstrosity within an ethics of sentimentality, to depictions of cruelty - of children mistreating animals, scientists engaged in vivisections, and the painful procedures of early surgery - in works like William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty, to the conflict between human sympathy and human freedom illustrated by the work of the Marquis de Sade. In each instance, the wish to deny cruelty a place within the human is matched by the strength of its continued existence as one of the human passions. "Cruel Delight" shows how the category of the inhuman in sentimental ethics was eventually transformed into a humanity of a higher order and how the ability to choose cruelty and ignore pity became a sign of human freedom.