===================== HES POSTING ==================== No one brought up Bentham? That's really funny. I didn't bring up Bentham because I couldn't read all the posts and I imagined someone else had. So nobody did? It is the rather obvious answer! (That "utility" came into economists vocabulary via "utilitarianism"!) One might simply note that the term "utility" did have a definition in the eighteenth century -- what we would call "usefulness", perhaps. Out of curiosity, have you gone the Oxford Dictionary route -- what does it say there for the origins of the term? Off-hand, I have to say it is not a term that pops up in the new American literature of the 18th century. Also, this is out of my area so I don't know what Bentham was himself into, but presumably he was well-acquainted with the Physiocrats. Farming was the most noble of occupations, because it was .... useful? Right? I hadn't really reflected on it before (though I am sure that many already have) , but it is kind of ironic that we connected utilitarianism with a form of hedonism, whereas the "problem" (for some) of the day was the role of "frills" in society -- whether the excesses of the Bourbons in the face of a starving populace, or the choice of a housewife to buy a mirror. In both New England and Virginia, the purchase of "frills" was considered immoral by the very religious -- the Congrationalists in New England (descendents of the Puritans); the Baptists in Virginia (antagonists of the landed ruling class in the Tidewater). But other places, the middle Atlantic, the backcountry, the cities -- while distribution of wealth and income might be an issue, what one chose to buy with one's income was not a moral issue at all. (And the silver tea set that was the epitome of "consumptionism" by some standards could also be seen as a type of investment that passes on through the female line ...) So was it "utility" in the austere sense? Or are we right to read it as hedonism of a form? If so, I sense a real shift in the meaning of the term. I guess then, that's where my questions would lie -- not what are the "origins" in a strict linear sense, but what were the "contexts" -- who was his audience; what were they wondering about; what could they have just taken for granted in his work, and what was new? And if you want to look for the "meaning" of the term, I would also suggest taking a few days and reading contemporary newspapers or pamphlets to see if the word pops up. (While we're on this subject -- when does "capitalism" become a phrase in common use? It's just not used in America in the 18th century; shows up suddenly EVERYWHERE about the second decade of the 1800s.) Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova University (on indefinite medical leave since January 1995) mailto:[log in to unmask] http://pw1.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]