elsewhere (Twining, 1985; 2019; Riley, [2018]). In 1806 he began drafting ‘Scotch Reform’, including a contrast between ‘natural’ arrangement of legal procedure and the existing ‘technical’ arrangement, which was comprehensible, if at all, only to lawyers (1843: v. 1–54), who Bentham was now convinced shared a sinister interest in maximizing their own opulence at the expense of the public. By 1809, the political elite and the King, the ‘Corrupter General’, had been added to the collective ruling few, and a newly democratic Bentham drafted ‘Plan of Parliamentary Reform’, which was finally published in 1817 (1843: iii. 433–552).
In the second decade of the new century, Bentham added the final element to ‘the ruling few’ in the form of the established Church. Over the next decade, he first convicted the Church of England of fostering ignorance and intellectual submission on the part of the populace (2011a), and then expanded his assault to include organized religion in general, especially in Christian form, or ‘Juggernaut’ as he called it. To avoid prosecution, the parts of that assault edited by George Grote (1822) and Francis Place (1823) appeared pseudonymously. The bulk of the assault remains unpublished, although the Bentham Project has made a start on producing it ([2013]; 2014). In the explosive final volume of ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’, Bentham reprised an argument he had made in analysis of penal law in the 1780s (1978), that consensual homosexual sex was a harmless activity, which should not be punished. He went on to argue that contraception, abortion, suicide, and infanticide by mothers should also be permitted ([2013]: 28–56, 59–7, 68–76), and that Jesus himself had probably indulged in gay sex ([2013]: 177–97). He initially proposed an ‘all-comprehensive liberty for all forms of sexual gratification not predominantly noxious’, but, in deference to homophobic public opinion, ended by proposing the replacement of hanging by banishment (2014: 140, 142). Ironically, much of this material was drafted at Forde Abbey in Somerset, the country retreat that he was able to lease for long periods between 1814 and 1818 thanks to the £23,000 he had received in compensation for the abandonment of the panopticon scheme.
In parallel with these works, Bentham substantially redrafted his writings on logic (1997; 1843: viii. 214–357) and composed major works on the detection of political lying (essential in a representative system) (2015), education (1983c) and private ethics (1983b). He also began a campaign to exploit the international reputation he had acquired from the success of Dumont’s recension Traités de législation civile et pénale – translated into several languages and selling 50,000 copies across Europe by 1830 – by offering his services to various governments to codify their laws. He began with the United States in 1811, and responded to President Madison’s tardy refusal by writing severally to state Governors. In 1814 he hoped that Alexander I of Russia might prove amenable, but was again frustrated. Revolutions in Spain and Portugal in 1820 prompted new hopes and new writings (1995; 2012), and he published Codification Proposal, addressed to ‘all nations professing liberal opinions’, in 1822 (1998), when the Portuguese finally supplied the longed-for invitation to draft civil, penal and constitutional codes. Bentham immediately began work on the massive Constitutional Code, which, with various preparatory essays (1989; 1993), occupied the last decade of his life. He continued corresponding with and writing for leaders or aspirant leaders in Tripoli and Greece (1990) and the now independent Spanish colonies in South America, encouraging them to adopt his ideas. The first volume of Constitutional Code was printed in 1827 and published in 1830 (1983a), but the remaining volumes appeared only in the edition of his works published after his death (1843 ix. 333–647).
In relation to British politics, Bentham cultivated powerful politicians who had given indications of pursuing legal reform, including Robert Peel and Henry Brougham. Both were finally condemned as mere tinkerers, recoiling from systematic reform (1993: 157–202; Riley, 2020). Far from being the ‘hermit’ of his own projection, he was unremittingly active in the world of affairs. As detailed by both Dinwiddy (1989: 16–19) and Crimmins (2004: 9–10; 2011: 157–78), he entertained a succession of dinner guests and turned his house into a centre for discussion of radical reform, viewing himself as unofficial leader of radicals in the Commons. One divisive personal influence was John Bowring, viewed by many of Bentham’s friends and supporters as an untrustworthy intellectual lightweight, who had succeeded by relentless flattery and adulation in turning the old man’s head until no criticism of him could be endured. The result was a self-conscious distancing by some of his closest friends and allies, including both Mills.
Bentham died on 6 June 1832, the day after the passage of the Act which ended the worst of Britain’s electoral abuses and set it on the path to representative democracy. He had committed his corpse to dissection for the benefit of medical science in his first will, made in 1769, and it was publicly dissected by his doctor, Thomas Southwood Smith, three days after his death. In accordance with Bentham’s instructions his skeleton, surmounted by a wax likeness of his head,3 padded with straw and dressed in his clothes, took up residence with Smith, before moving to UCL in 1850. Smith had written an article in the Westminster Review, the radical periodical established with Bentham’s financial backing in 1823, on the uses of the dead to the living, arguing that the medical progress was being obstructed by lack of bodies for dissection. Under English law, dissection served as an additional deterrent to the crime of murder, while Christian orthodoxy demanded the interment of an integral corpse to facilitate eventual resurrection. Late in life Bentham wrote ‘Auto-Icon, or Farther Uses of the dead to the living’ (Crimmins, 2002), taking one last opportunity to ridicule lawyers and the Church, and providing considerable evidence of intellectual vanity. Two points might be made: first, ‘Auto-Icon’ constitutes the last salvo in Bentham’s long anti-clerical campaign in favour of a materialist view of the world. A corpse was simply a physical object like any other, and no longer the site of sensations, good or bad. As such, its only immediate use was to facilitate medical instruction. Second, if suitably preserved, it might provide opportunities for recalling happy memories on one hand, and, more importantly, for moral and political learning on the other. He anticipated that auto-icons of political leaders might be transferred from a ‘hall of fame’ to a ‘hall of infamy’ according to the ongoing judgments of public opinion. Educational debates might be undertaken by auto-icons of figures on either side of a controversy, with voices supplied by actors and gestures by transforming the auto-icons into giant puppets. Bentham, of course, imagined that his auto-icon would feature heavily in such debates, while the drama would add to the attraction and the effect, thus opening a new avenue of indirect legislation (see Ch. 4).
§ 2. Logic and Language
As we have seen, Bentham decided early on that English law as it existed did not make sense: it was incomprehensible and unable to guide conduct consistently (2016b: 113–14, 293–5). Legal and political discussion was vitiated by the fact that its core vocabulary (words like right, duty and justice) consisted of terms either undefined or badly defined. Its metaphysics, its science of meaning, was a contradictory chaos, even without taking into account the penchant of common lawyers to work around procedural constraints by resorting to fictional devices, which made assertions all knew to be untrue. Designating phantoms, non-entities, as really existing entities did not offer a constructive solution.
Since law played an essential role in guiding action, leaving law in such a misleading and incomprehensible condition was a dereliction of duty on the part of legislators. In response, drawing on the inheritance of Locke, Hume and D’Alembert (1843: iii. 286), Bentham attempted no less than the invention of a new logic rooted in sense experience. Central to this enterprise was the verbal distinction, reflecting an underlying ontological distinction, between real and fictitious entities. ‘A fictitious entity is an entity to which, though by the grammatical form of the discourse employed in speaking of it existence is ascribed, yet in truth and reality existence is not meant to be ascribed.’ Conversely, a real entity . . . is ‘an entity to which existence is really meant to be ascribed’ (1997: 164 (UC cii. 16)).
The moment language, a construction of the human mind for the formation, recording and transmission of thought, evolved beyond declaration of desire or aversion towards particular
