James Mill sur la moralité et la décision : une question de calcul. / Through the part it played in the formation of William Stanley Jevons’s mathematical theory of economics (Nathalie Sigot 2002), Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus seems to have influenced recent views on individual behavior and decisional issues (William Stark 1946; Collison R. D. Black 1988). Obviously, this influence was complex, such that Bentham’s teaching remained far from being a mere pre-figuration of the standard approach (see, forinstance, Andre Lapidus & Sigot 2000). This conjunction between an influence on the standard approach and an analysis which was irreducible to it, recalls that Bentham’s own period was also a turning point: that of a passage from the moral debates of the eighteenth century, to the first formulation of the manner in which decision-making became understood from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. It is from this point of view that James Mill was to play a crucial part, and not only as a well-known friend of Bentham and as official spokesman for classical Utilitarianism. James Mill had something to say about calculation, which had specific relevance for him through the importance he gave to associationism and, more generally, to psychological matters.

Late 18th Britain was experiencing the beginnings of social unrest fueled in part by the American and French Revolutions. The established two class social system was being challenged by the emergence of a middle class seeking something more than traditional agricultural work. While they subscribed to very different philosophies of mind, both Stewart and Mill saw the solution to potential social chaos in a revised educational system that would open the doors to a peaceful development of that middle class. What the new educational system should look like was a direct function of the theory of mind held by the two protagonists. Employing an enlarged Foucaultian framework, this dissertation examines the various forces at work in transforming British society as it prepares for the unanticipated forthcoming industrial revolution. / Ph. D.

This work examines British inquiry into the human mind in the early nineteenth century using a multivalent structural analysis of ideas and practices within traditions established by Hume, Hartley, and Reid. While these traditions were propagated into the nineteenth century by such figures as Thomas Brown, James Mill, Sir William Hamilton, and Alexander Bain, this later period has received a dearth of attention in the history of psychology, the history of philosophy, and the history of ideas in general. This conspicuous lacuna forms the basis for two simple questions: What was the situated significance of work on the human mind in nineteenth century Britain? What was it supposed to accomplish, or be about? In particular, I focus on the differentiation of science from philosophy as a particular kind of non-science, investigating a set of existing formulations of the respective characters of the two. Using this historiographic survey as a springboard, I establish an analytical apparatus based upon four structural dimensions that I term conceptual, expository, iconic, and genealogical. Taken together, these four elements form an historical problematic, a set of persistent features and issues that structured work on mental subjects. With respect to conceptual structure, I propose a set of a dozen persistently central, but fluid, concept clusters involved in the study of mind. Regarding texts themselves, I situate my subject in terms of specific audience groups, patterns of expository development, and topical scope. I also examine the limiting influence of authorial and editorial practices on the appearance of the conceptual systems these texts convey. Iconic structural patterns focus even more closely on textual content, demonstrating shifts in the density, nature, and extent of citation within the intellectual community. These four dimensions interact significantly, reflecting the complex character of an active community of intellectual discussion. Having established this analytical space, I return to the basic terminological distinction between science and philosophy to investigate what was at stake in distinguishing these two fields in the nineteenth century. The dichotomy was far from definitive: British mental inquiry from the time of Hume's Treatise to that of Bain's first two major works never established a firm division of science from philosophy, but the evidence suggests several directions of tension along which this split would subsequently emerge. As demonstrated by evidence from the first volume of the journal, Mind, founded by Bain in 1876, discussions among students of the human mind in the nineteenth century established a position for mental philosophy itself as arbiter of the new science-philosophy dipole. In this light, the establishment of Mind can be viewed as the creation of a boundary-object that itself constituted this distinction in psychological terms. / Ph. D.