Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This book addresses three questions. The first question is historical: how did the utilitarian idea of the art school emerge in contrast to the academy of art in Britain in the 1830s, and what were its effects?

The second question is philosophical and cultural: what were the necessary and sufficient conditions set by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham’s moral and political economies of taste, which allowed the idea of the art school and the critique of art academies to be developed?

The third question is political - did Bentham’s radical ideas on identity, cultural difference, taste and governance offer a viable framework for the pursuit of cultural policy objectives, and how does the utilitarian idea of the art school ‘cash out’ intellectually in terms of current approaches to utilitarian thinking in public pedagogy and public policy?

This book is an intellectual history of the utilitarian idea of the art school in Britain, an idea that developed in response to a problem of pedagogy in commercial society posed by political economic theory.

Its publication co-incides with the 175th anniversary of the establishment of the first publicly funded art school, the School of Design, in 1837.

Contents:

Introduction

1 'Reading Reynolds With Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham’s Moral Economy of Taste
3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole’s Laws of Public Taste
4 The End of the Experiment
5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
6 The Return of Adam Smith
Epilogue

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