Promotional Information

Engelmann revisits Jeremy Bentham's conception of the reducibility of social life to monistic interests, on the way to rethinking monism's centrality to liberal political philosophy

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Against the Usual Story 17
3. Virtuous Economies 35
4. Imagining Interest 48
5. State Rationality 77
6. The Public Interest 104
7. The Economic Polity 141
Notes 151
Index 185

About the Author

Stephen G. Engelmann is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reviews

"Imagining Interest in Political Thought is an extremely impressive, powerful, and exciting work which casts important light on a crucial yet surprisingly neglected aspect of the history of political thought: the emergence of utilitarianism as a major political theory and its subversion of conceptions of natural law and civic humanism as the basis for social cooperation."—Philip Schofield, General Editor, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham