This is how Thorstein Veblen sees the hedonistic calculus as it applies to economics (and liberalism). If you detect the ideas of quietism and social darwinism in these ideas, you’re probably on to something. Every individual is responsible for his own life and failure or success. They owe nothing to society, nor does society owe them anything, unless it’s protection from violent death and market instability. Men are individuals and their lives are determined by them alone. It’s clear that none of the classical liberals were about to identify class as a variable in their theoretical musings, either. Macpherson suggests that Hobbes must have been smoking some good weed because he didn’t recognize that his ‘man in nature’ was really a particular specimen of ‘civilized’ man. The role of the sovereign in this should then be to protect the market, to ensure its independence and logic.Ĭonveniently, Hobbes, who was instrumental in getting classical liberalism off the ground, rationalized his view of man as derived from what he considered man in a state of nature. Logically, then, the market should be left alone to determine the value of everything, including labour power. #Hedonic calculus example freeSo, men are free as individuals.īecause society is a set of market relations, the price of land, labour, etc., is determined in the marketplace. For the landless, however, with no land, the only property they have is their labour-power, their ability to work. he can’t sell himself, obviously, that would be slavery, but he can sell his property and buy and sell land. It’s handy that the individual is in charge of himself because, then he can sell things and acquire things. Society starts and ends with the individual or rather, society is just a set of market relations. Individualism is critical to classical liberalism. The sovereign’s role is as arbiter of disputes between individuals because, when you get right down to it, we are all in a power struggle with everyone else and we’re driven by fear, so someone has to keep order. That’s why Hobbes argued that we need a permanent sovereign. Of course in pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain we must not harm others. So, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham and the other classical liberals start their argument with the notion of individual sovereignty, that is, that individuals are the focus of their analysis and have complete charge of their behaviour which is always determined by a calculation of the pleasure or pain involved in any given act or situation. The balance, if it to be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole.1 ‘Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side,’ Bentham advised, ‘and those of all the pains on the other. These ‘dimensions of value’ as Bentham calls them, are significant only because they indicate Bentham’s conviction that we are able to fix these dimensions quantitatively, add up the quantities, balance the totals against each other with more or less mathematical precision, and select the greater. In directing our conduct, we seek that pleasure which is most intent, of longest duration, most certain, nearer, and so forth. In a comment on the hedonistic calculus as conceived by Bentham Girvetz writes:Ī pleasure or pain varies in (1) intensity, (2) duration, (3) certainty, (4) propinquity when we take into account the other pleasures or pains that might result from the act or event which produced it, it varies in (5) fecundity and (6) purity and, when we take other persons into account, it varies in (7) extent. It has also infected our moral sense in a big way. Now, the hedonistic calculus has far-reaching significance for capitalist social relations, our conception of the nature of society as consisting solely of market relations, liberalism and certainly for economics. It seems that the English were quite concerned with their hedonism and the notion that they should be individually in charge of it. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) came up with the bones of the same idea much earlier and others followed, e.g. He’s the guy who formalized the calculus, also called the felicific calculus, but he wasn’t the first one to think along those lines.
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