SOURCE: “A Critique of Elie Halévy,” in Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 283, January, 1998, pp. 97-111.

In the following essay, Vergara maintains that Halévy, in his Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, “completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers.”

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, first published in France in three volumes as La formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901-1904) and translated into English in 1926.¹ The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually definitive analysis of utilitarianism²’. More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as...