it offered did not please Jeremiah, and their relationship, while courteous, remained strained. He was however, and remained, close to his brother, encouraging his interest in science, doing what he could to assist him in establishing his own career, and expressing the affection he himself, he perhaps felt, had been denied. Another important relationship for Bentham was with John Lind, a decade older and much more worldly wise, who was acting as unofficial agent for the King of Poland in London. Bentham had met Lind at Oxford, and after Lind’s return to London in 1773 the two became, at the least, intimate friends, co-operating in writing in support of the British government in relation to the growing crisis in its American colonies.2
In 1776 Bentham’s A Fragment on Government – an offshoot of a larger critique of Blackstone only published in the twentieth century (1977) – was published anonymously. Fragment followed Hume in rejecting the social contract as the basis of governmental authority, and identified ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ as the standard of right and wrong (1977: 393). There was considerable speculation over its author’s identity, which abated along with its sales when Jeremiah, unable to contain his pride in its success, disclosed Bentham’s authorship. One approving reader was the Earl of Shelburne, a powerful Whig politician, soon briefly to lead the British government, who sought Bentham out in 1780 and invited him to spend the next summer at his country seat. Shelburne, who had encouraged Richard Price and Joseph Priestley among other aspiring thinkers, and controlled several seats in the House of Commons, remained close to Bentham for over a decade. Through Shelburne, Bentham gained access to circles of privilege and power, meeting the young William Pitt, who failed to impress him (1843: x. 119), and the reforming lawyer Samuel Romilly, who became a long-term friend and confidant. The most significant contact for Bentham’s future reputation was Étienne Dumont, a Genevan refugee who would be responsible, through abbreviated and accessible recensions of Bentham’s writings, for making him known in Europe and the Americas as a legal theorist.
In the 1770s Bentham began developing the linguistic tools necessary to exchange sense in discussion of law, and decided that only codified, written law, could remedy the deficiencies of judge-made Common Law, under which no one could be sure what the law was until the judge pronounced it. Common Law was ‘incognoscible’, unknowable, making a mockery of law’s action-guiding purpose. Each judgment being specific to a particular case, no one could be sure that it would be held relevant in apparently similar future cases. Judges interpreted law as they pleased, sometimes relying strictly on precedent, sometimes on personal moral intuitions, so that it was inconsistent and arbitrary. Since only lawsuits gave rise to judgments, it was also radically incomplete. Bentham undertook the task of setting out principles underlying a pannomion or complete code of law. Following Beccaria, and responding to growing willingness on the part of rulers to rationalize and codify state-inflicted punishments, he focused initially on penal law (de Champs, 2015: 55–69). By 1780, he had largely printed An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1996) (henceforth IPML), where this focus is evident (Ch. 3), but is prefaced by discussion of human psychology and presentation of the principle of utility as the only rational foundation for both morality and law (Ch. 2). In 1782, he developed his ‘logic of the will’ (see 2010b: 115–18), a form of deontic logic effectively reinvented in the twentieth century. In the next years, he began writing self-consciously for a European audience, using French in the effort to make his intended ‘Projet d’un code de loix détaillé et complet, à l’usage d’un état quelconque’ accessible to European sovereigns, and especially Catherine the Great, who had indicated her desire to codify Russian law (de Champs, 2014: 185–94).
In 1785 Bentham travelled to Russia to join his brother Samuel, who had secured employment with Prince Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite. He remained there until late 1787, but never made the approach to Catherine. He reacted enthusiastically to Samuel’s invention of the panopticon principle, and wrote a short work extolling its application wherever supervision was required (Ch. 6). A report that the British government, now headed by Pitt, planned to reduce the legal rate of interest prompted Bentham to write Defence of Usury (2016a: 43–121), arguing that Adam Smith had been wrong to defend legal limitations of interest rates, which often presented an insuperable obstacle to innovation by making it impossible for borrower and lender to agree on distributing the additional risks and returns of new enterprises.
Bentham returned to London early in 1788 and in 1789, buoyed by the positive reception of Defence of Usury, published IPML which, however, made hardly a ripple. At the behest partly of Shelburne, now Marquess of Landsdowne, and motivated partly by his own sympathy for Russia, which had been attacked by Sweden, Bentham wrote to the press castigating Pitt’s foreign policy, and made plans for a never-realized work on international law, including a plan for a European tribunal to settle disputes (see 2016a: liii–lix; 1843: ii. 535–60; and Ch. 8). In 1790, preparation for a new edition of Defence of Usury prompted his first effort to write a handbook of political economy (2016a: 165–214). In parallel, encouraged by the Irish administration, Bentham drafted two lengthy ‘Postscripts’ to the Panopticon, and all three were printed, but not published, in Dublin and London (1843: iv. 37–172). However, no official invitation arrived, and Bentham instead attempted, with no small success, to promote the plan to influential parties in England (Blamires, 2008: 57–62, 66–73).
In 1792, Bentham’s father died, and Bentham inherited his estate, including the house on the edge of St James’s Park which would be home for the rest of his life. The Bentham brothers, reunited by Samuel’s return to London in 1791, had by July 1793 succeeded in convincing the British government of the virtues of both the panopticon penitentiary and contracting with them to build and manage it (1981: 22–3). With their new wealth they began to stockpile construction materials. Bentham was, as Blamires argues (2008: 16–17, 39, 42), committed to seizing the opportunity to model a successful utilitarian institution, likely hoping to combine this with continued writing on law, since he anticipated that, once established, the prison would operate like clockwork (2010a: 349–51). He spent much time over the next ten years in a doomed attempt to hold the administration to its word (Semple, 1993; Blamires, 2008: 56–94).
A further prospect for the adoption of the panopticon had been opened by the developing crisis in France. Dumont was now there, effectively working as a publicist for the Comte de Mirabeau, a leading figure early in the revolution. Bentham sought to exploit the suddenly fluid political order to suggest wide-ranging reforms in organization of courts, parliamentary procedure, prisons, political economy and, finally, constitutional law. Briefly, he planned to advocate a massive extension of the franchise in England, but the violent turn of events in France made him an opponent of electoral reform at home for fear of empowering ignorance (see Ch. 7: 135–6). Ironically, just as violence erupted in Paris in August 1792, he was accorded honorary citizenship by the Legislative Assembly. In 1794, he reviewed possible sources of government finance (2019a: 151–262), and developed a proposal devised ten years earlier to generate revenue painlessly by escheat to the state of half the value of estates of those dying childless (2019a: 1–149). Between 1796 and 1798 he developed a plan for provision of poor relief by a National Charity Company, to replace the patchwork of parish authorities holding responsibility under the existing system (2001; 2010a).
In 1799, Bentham finally took possession of a site for the panopticon prison, but the nimbyism of the powerful continued to frustrate attempts to build it. Meanwhile, suspension of payment in specie by the Bank of England in February 1797 prompted him to investigate the supply of credit, and three years’ work produced a detailed proposal for the issue of interest-bearing currency ([2019b]) and a second attempt to distil political economy into a handbook ([2019c5–8]). When Pitt resigned in 1801 Bentham engaged with the new administration, attempting to persuade it of the merits of his currency and of fulfilling the previous administration’s commitment to the prison.
After the definitive rejection of the panopticon plan in 1803, Bentham began drafting the massive, and massively influential, work on evidence edited in 1827 by the young J.S. Mill (1843: vi. 189–585 and vii. 1–598). This work, closely related
