Abstract

This was a talk delivered as part of the annual 'Bentham Seminars Programme' at UCL. This talk was based on an article ‘Jeremy Bentham on Liberty of Taste’ in History of European Ideas. In the talk I argued that that, firstly, Bentham gives us a new description of taste by including it within a discourse on sexuality, secondly that, under this new description, taste takes its meaning from a social model of utility and finally that the manner in which Bentham deals with taste in the essays on sexuality placed him in direct conflict with middle-class taste as it had developed over the previous century, and as it was to develop further in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.