Jeremy Bentham, the British utilitarian theorist of morals and politics, took an exceptional interest in Spanish America between 1808 and his death in 1832. He envisioned the region as a utopia where new governments could be created and legislation drawn up according to the only valid principle, the greatest good for the greatest number. Bentham made a serious, but unsuccessful, effort to obtain Spanish permission to emigrate to America in 1808, where he was to serve as legislator of Aaron Burr’s chimerical Mexican Empire. He subsequently prepared constitutional codes, laws for education and the press, a proposal for an inter-oceanic canal, and a document in 1820-21 advising Spain to emancipate the colonies. He carried on a lengthy correspondence with Spanish American leaders, notably Bernardino Rivadavia, Simón Bolívar, and José del Valle; and he bombarded them with materials and with advice on the establishment of new institutions.
Williford’s narrowly focused, but carefully constructed, monograph is a detailed exposition of this Bentham material, most of it in manuscript in London. The author’s presentation of Bentham’s ideas is lucid, and the reader emerges with a vivid sense of the pitfalls of the rationalist mentality, the assumption that if laws can be drawn up according to a valid principle, they can be applied universally, without concern for cultural differences. Bentham was ignorant of Spanish America and naive in his proposals, yet he inspired awe in men like Rivadavia, as Williford demonstrates. Because of inconclusive evidence in Bentham’s writings, the author turned away from her original inquiry into Bentham’s influence, so that the book becomes a contribution to Bentham studies rather than a larger contribution to the history of ideas in Spanish America. Bentham’s great impact on Spanish American liberalism still needs to be explained, but it must be done from American as well as from English evidence.
