The early nineteenth-century British movement that took Bentham's utilitarian framework and turned it into a program of political reform: expanded suffrage, secret ballot, free trade, secular education, cheap and codified law, and the systematic rationalization of public institutions along lines that could be defended by argument rather than by precedent.
James Mill was its organizer and chief polemicist, arguing in his Essay on Government (1820) that representative institutions could be deduced from the psychology of interest. Around him gathered George Grote, Francis Place, Joseph Hume and the economists in Ricardo's orbit; the Westminster Review, founded in 1824, gave the group a platform against both Whig and Tory establishments. John Stuart Mill was raised inside the movement as a deliberate experiment in its educational theories, and his later career is largely a record of what he came to think it had left out.
Their influence on the Reform Act of 1832 and on the general direction of nineteenth-century British liberalism was substantial and mostly runs in one direction: they won. Codification, professional administration, competitive examination for the civil service and the removal of trade restrictions were all radical proposals that became unremarkable features of the modern state.
Their record is not uniformly attractive. The same confidence that public institutions could be redesigned from principle produced the New Poor Law of 1834, whose deterrent workhouse was a deliberate application of the doctrine and is the most-cited evidence that the movement understood incentives better than it understood people. The younger Mill's break with the doctrinaire version — his insistence on individuality, on the limits of interest-psychology, and on what Bentham's framework could not see — is the tradition's most honest self-criticism.