climate change.
The focus of this study is Bentham as a theorist of government. Given the breadth and fecundity of his thought, many parts of it will not be directly addressed. Thus, his writings on private ethics, ‘adjective law’ or procedure, religion and fallacies, and his detailed critiques of natural right will be addressed only in passing. Bentham’s default perspective is that of government, of a utilitarian legislator seeking to guide human action by manipulating its necessary conditions. His writings are explorations of methods of influencing human conduct to good ends, and their fundamental tool is analysis of the interaction between human agents facing decisions about what to do on the one hand, and the architecture of choice – the constellation of physical, legal, institutional and normative factors that influence decision-making – on the other, which is to say that Bentham was self-consciously an engineer of choices.
It might be objected that this perspective renders his theory necessarily ‘top down’, with the hapless subjects of law dancing to the legislator’s tune and even, thanks to habitual deference and false consciousness (a term which for Bentham meant the belief that something existed which did not exist (1996: 75)), passively endorsing their manipulation and indeed actively assisting it. Broadly, this is the Foucauldian critique of modernity and of Bentham, whom Foucault described as more important to modern society than either Kant or Hegel (1994: ii. 594). The argument of this book is, crudely, that Foucault was half right. Bentham, even before his transition to political radicalism, was simultaneously a technologist of governmental reason and an exposer of misrule, seeking both to oil the wheels of public power and to render its exercise transparent to the public over whom, and on whose behalf, it was exercised.
A Word on Sources
Bentham was a prolific writer but positively awful at bringing his writings into publishable form, with the result that at his death he left some 70,000 pages of manuscript, most of which is now held by UCL special collections. The reputation he gained in Europe and America as an important thinker on law and politics was owed to the simplified recensions of his manuscripts edited in French by the Genevan Étienne Dumont (see Blamires, 2008), especially Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802). In Britain, for well over a century Bentham’s writings were available largely through the inadequate edition of his works overseen by John Bowring (1843), large parts of which were retranslations of Dumont’s recensions. In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established at UCL to oversee a critical edition of Bentham’s writings, and the first volume was published in 1968. Thus far, thirty-four of a projected eighty volumes have appeared, so that there remains much to come.
Until relatively recently any influence that Bentham had, other than through direct contact, was exercised by what Lieberman calls ‘the historical Bentham’ (1999), that is the one known through the works he did publish and the editions of Dumont and Bowring. The vision informing the work of the Bentham Project is to make available a more ‘authentic’ Bentham, derived from scholarly editing of both published writings and manuscript sources. Of course, no edition can ever be unproblematically authentic: the authentic Bentham died in 1832. Every editor constructing a text brings with them their own conscious or unconscious presuppositions and biases, while putting a Bentham volume together requires countless decisions, great and small, which impact on both shape and content. That said, the effort to assemble texts by studying the evidence of their origin and development, and attempting to realize what the editor takes to be Bentham’s most developed intentions in regard to their presentation, must be the right approach.
Finally, it would be a dereliction of duty not to advertise the opportunity for everyone to try their hand at reading Bentham’s hand and contribute to the completion of a major and perennially under-funded research project through the Project’s ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiative. Those interested should visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/transcribe-bentham
1 Life and Logic: What Matters, and Why?
Nonsense . . . is not a mere vague reproach: . . . it is a meaning definite and compleatly defensible. Nonsense – what is it but . . . words without corresponding ideas of which they are the sign. (UC lxi. 34 (1828))
§ 1. Life and Work
On 15 February 1748 Alicia Bentham (née Grove) gave birth to her first child Jeremy in Houndsditch in East London. Alicia had six more children over the next nine years, of whom only the last, Samuel (1757–1831), survived infancy. Bentham’s lifetime witnessed massive historical changes, beginning two years after the last pitched battle on British soil, ending as the Great Reform Bill passed, and taking in not only the American and French Revolutions, but the transformation of Britain into the first industrial economy. His childhood was prosperous, but not emotionally warm, especially after his mother’s death in 1759. He was prodigiously gifted, reading fluently by the age of three, and his father Jeremiah, a successful lawyer and property speculator, fed his cognitive development, hoping that he would one day rise to legal eminence.
Jeremy was taught Latin, Greek, French, music and art, though for a philosopher of pleasure his childhood seems to have been rather ascetic, since he was forbidden books offering mere ‘amusement’, as unsuitable for children (1843: x. 21). His parents were religiously and politically conservative; devotion to religious practice and principles was emphasized. Late in life Bentham recalled that his childhood had been blighted by fear of the supernatural, exacerbated by servants who tormented him with tales of malign spirits inhabiting the toilet at his grandmother’s house (1843: x. 18–19). He had very limited contact with children of his own age before arriving at the exclusive Westminster School in 1755 (1843: x. 14), where he was bullied for his small stature and his intelligence. Dutifully, he tried to satisfy parental expectations, but his childhood must have been a lonely one, alleviated by extended summer visits to his grandmothers in Hampshire and Essex, where the atmosphere was less intense, and he could develop his lifelong interests in nature and science.
In 1760 Bentham, aged twelve, was enrolled at Oxford University, receiving his BA in 1763. His life at Oxford continued lonely, unstimulating and, thanks to Jeremiah’s parsimony, impecunious. In order to graduate, scholars were required to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, and the young Bentham, viewing them as a series of statements combining obvious falsehoods with contradictory or meaningless prescriptions, but aware that failure to subscribe would shatter his father’s ambitions for him, sacrificed his integrity to that ambition and swore the self-consciously perjurious oath with a sense of intellectual betrayal the bitter memory of which lingered for the rest of his life (2011a: 35–6).
Bentham’s father rented lodgings for him in Lincoln’s Inn and provided a rental income of £100 a year. For a while, he continued ploughing the furrow set before him, attending the courts in Westminster Hall and pursuing the path to qualify as a barrister, before being called to the bar as he came of age in 1769. By then, however, two things had changed. First, Bentham had returned to Oxford to hear the lectures on jurisprudence given by William Blackstone, Vinerian Professor of Law, and decided that English law as it existed, as delivered by Blackstone and witnessed in Westminster Hall, did not make sense: it was, strictly speaking, incomprehensible. The epigraph to this chapter comes from a much later indictment of Common Law in just these terms. Second, he had exploited his relative independence to read the leading authors of the Enlightenment, and enthusiastically adopted their ambition to substitute science for superstition in all areas, especially morality and law. Helvétius (1759), Beccaria (1995) and Hume (2007), who all aspired to establish morality on a scientific footing, were authors who particularly inspired him.1 Having reached his majority, Bentham concluded that his particular genius and mission was not to practise law but to establish its foundation on a rational basis (1843: x. 27). To do so, he began to develop the ontology and epistemology presented in § 2 of this chapter.
Bentham’s
