H
H. L. A. Hart
Researcher at University of Oxford
Publications - 82
Citations - 15690
H. L. A. Hart is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Jurisprudence & Morality. The author has an hindex of 31, co-authored 82 publications receiving 15317 citations. Previous affiliations of H. L. A. Hart include University of Georgia.
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Symposium: Is There Knowledge by Acquaintance?
Journal ArticleDOI
Bentham and the United States of America
Abstract: IN 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence, and an annus mirabilis in English letters, Jeremy Bentham opened an epoch in political and legal theory; for not only did he announce in A Fragment on Government, published anonymously in that year, his first formulation of the principle of utility, according to which, "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,"' but in the same year, 1776, he fired the first shot, in an Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress,2 of a long sceptical campaign conducted against the doctrine of natural and unalienable rights of man. In legal theory Bentham's sharp severance in the Fragment between law as it is and law as it ought to be and his insistence that the foundations of a legal system are properly described in the morally neutral terms of a general habit of obedience opened the long positivist tradition in English jurisprudence. It may be that the epoch which Bentham thus opened is now closing: certainly among American political and legal philosophers utilitarianism is on the defensive, if not on the run, in the face of theories of justice which3 in many ways resemble the doctrine of the unalienable rights of man; and there are now new forms of old theories holding that there are important conceptual connections between law and morality obscured by the positivist tradition.4