Jeremy Bentham

English legal scholar and social reformer

• Born: February 15, 1748
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: June 6, 1832
• Place of death: London, England

Bentham’s lifelong critical analysis of English law and society laid the foundations for the early nineteenth century political reforms that saved England from violent social revolution. He is best known for his utilitarian ideas and for extending legal thought beyond questions of law. Also, with his brother, he conceptualized a structure of confinement and surveillance called a Panopticon.

Early Life

Jeremy Bentham was the son of a prosperous English lawyer named Jeremiah Bentham. The elder Bentham wanted his son to have advantages that he had missed, so the father was delighted at his precocious son’s ability to read at the age of three. Young Bentham accordingly was packed off to the Westminster School and then on to Oxford by the time he was twelve. Because of his youth and small stature, this “dwarfish phenomenon,” as Bentham called himself, never engaged in the usual activities of the boys his age. While his peers may have played cricket, he contented himself with badminton. His world was contained within the boundaries of books and ideas.

At Westminster School, Bentham encountered his first acknowledged intellectual battle with English law. All students at the school were required to sign an oath supporting the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England. Already an advocate of logical thinking, the young prodigy privately believed that the articles were so irrational and contrary to the Scriptures that the Church was forcing perjury on those required to sign them. In this instance, and throughout his entire life, however, Bentham obeyed the law and did the expected but privately agonized over what he had done, vowing silently to battle for the reform of the English legal system, not to mention the Church of England.

Perhaps no other scholar in English history spent so much time studying and writing about the law and the legal system but practically no time practicing it. Once the brilliant youngster finished his course of study at Westminster, he entered Oxford. Toward the middle of his third year at Oxford, he attended a lecture by the most famous English legal scholar of his day, William Blackstone, the first of whose Commentaries on the Laws of England would be published beginning in 1765. The fifteen-year-old student eagerly attended the presentation given by the forty-year-old jurist, the first professor of English law at Oxford.

Diligently, Bentham attempted to follow the lecture by recording its essentials in notes, but he could not. There were so many internal fallacies and illogical premises in what Blackstone pronounced that Bentham gave up his attempts at note taking.

This incident likely marked the beginning of Bentham’s lifelong battle against English law and the legal system that supported it. While Blackstone might marvel at the “glorious inconsistency” of English law, Bentham denounced English law as an abhorrent mass of confusion, designed to be manipulated by those with the money and patience sufficient to retain the proper attorneys.

Most repugnant to Bentham throughout his lifetime of intellectual jousting was falsehood. At Westminster School, he had despised being forced to sign the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion; he believed not only that the statements were lies but also that his signature compounded the prevarication. Subsequently, in his attendance at Blackstone’s lecture, he encountered English law as an even greater fabric of falsification. Especially frustrating to him was the notion of fiction in law, a method by which legal entities might be created or destroyed at the whim of the court and its attorneys. Appalled at this practice, Bentham declared that “in English law, fiction is a syphilis, which runs in every vein, and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness.”

Life’s Work

Although Jeremy Bentham read law at Lincoln’s Inn after he took his master’s degree from Oxford in 1766 and was called to the bar the following year, he was never a successful practicing lawyer. Instead, he spent each day in his rooms reading and writing about the law or conversing with the other law students who came to call. He set himself the daily task of writing more than fifteen folio practice pages of commentary on English law or society. These trial pages, or drafts, dealt with numerous subjects of interest to him. The dedication and intensity with which Bentham labored were so consuming that he suffered bouts of psychosomatic blindness. Only the loving attendance of his friends brought him through these extremely depressing periods.

In the course of his long life, many thousands of pages were written, many on subjects he never fully developed and many of which were never published. His first publication was a critique of Blackstone, printed anonymously in 1776 under the title A Fragment on Government. So brilliant and masterful was this work that it was attributed to many great minds of the time. Ironically, when his proud father accidentally revealed the true authorship of the essay, the headline-hungry public no longer was interested.

Bentham’s accomplishment did, however, bring him to the attention of William Petty, Lord Shelburne, who introduced him to the world of the nobility by extending his patronage to the young intellectual. Perhaps most important, Shelburne helped broaden Bentham’s criticisms of English law to include constitutional law along with his ongoing considerations of civil and penal law. Although Shelburne could never provide Bentham an office of political power, he did afford him an insight into the functions of the enlightened minority within the English political establishment.

In what Bentham thought, said, and wrote for the next seventy years, he did what few Englishmen had ever dared, and did so successfully. As his intellectual godson, John Stuart Mill, explained, “Bentham broke the spell. . . . Who, before Bentham, dared to speak disrespectfully in express terms, of the British Constitution, or the English Law?” He was not, however, merely a “negative philosopher,” wrote Mill, but a person of questioning spirit who demanded the “why” of everything and then applied his “essentially practical mind” toward a system of solutions for the problems which he saw.

Fourteen years after his first published work, Bentham introduced his proposition commonly known as the principle of utility, or the utilitarian idea. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham proclaimed that through legislation the government could achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals in society. Whether Bentham realized it or not, he had in effect launched a major reform crusade in English politics, the ultimate results of which would not be realized until the various social changes undertaken by English reformers had passed through Parliament after the Reform Bill of 1832.

Despite the implicit radicalism of his ideas, Bentham continued to live his rather ordinary existence as legal scholar and budding political philosopher. Two events that influenced his thinking in major ways were his trip to Russia for a visit with his brother Sam in the 1780’s and his correspondence with the political leaders of the French Revolution in the 1790’s.

From his travels abroad and his lengthy correspondence in response to the queries from his friends in France about reorganizing government and society there, Bentham drew new inspiration for his critiques of his own society. He became convinced that the very framework of English society needed a thoroughgoing revision based on his utilitarian principles. Made independently wealthy by his father’s death in 1792, Bentham could thereafter use the family home at Queen Square Place and the income from the estate to support himself, his ideas, and any social experiments he might choose to undertake.

Bentham and his brother Sam did attempt to implement one philanthropic scheme, a model prison that was grandly named the Panopticon. From Sam’s architectural knowledge was drawn the plan for the building laid out in the shape of a wheel. In the model prison, the keeper resided in the center of the wheel, where he could see all the prisoners. By a clever structural arrangement of floors and walls, the inmates could not see one another or the keeper but were imprisoned in isolation, away from the corrupting influences of one another. Although many applauded the theories of the Benthams, lack of government support forced them to abandon their plans. Not until 1813 did the British government attempt to repay them for the money they had spent trying to persuade Parliament to adopt their plan.

However intellectually and emotionally democratized Bentham may have become, he did not take up his role as inspiration for a political movement until after 1808, when he met James Mill. Mill’s writing and activism helped turn Bentham’s political teachings into practice. Out of this background developed those politicians known as the Benthamites, who sometimes were called the Philosophical Radicals or the Utilitarians. Within a little more than a decade, the publications of James Mill, coupled with the activities of his son, John Stuart Mill, brought the Utilitarians into public prominence. Convinced that nothing positive would be written about them either by the Whig Edinburgh Review or the Tory Quarterly Review, the Utilitarians used their mentor’s financial backing to launch the Westminster Review.

In the twilight years between 1820 and Bentham’s death in 1832, the elderly sage still drew a circle of admirers, disciples, and curiosity seekers to his home in London. By this time, Bentham’s hearing had failed so badly that within an hour visitors often found themselves exhausted from raising their voices to be heard. His voice continued to be heard, however, even after his death. To further the goal of spreading Bentham’s ideas, his followers were responsible for the establishment of University College, London. There his bones rest, dressed in his usual clothing, a wax model of his head atop the auto-icon, and his skull at his feet.

Significance

The emergence of the Benthamites into political activism was by no means the first occasion on which Jeremy Bentham’s ideas aroused controversy and criticism. No one could engage in a lifelong critique of English law and society without awakening the wrath of powerful individuals determined to protect the establishment. Bentham’s responses to criticism were sometimes regarded as petty and perhaps uninformed. As John Stuart Mill explained, however, Bentham’s reactions were peculiar because the great philosopher was

essentially a boy. He had the freshness, the simplicity, the confidingness, the liveliness and activity, all the delightful qualities of boyhood, and the weaknesses which are the reverse side of those qualities—the undue importance attached to trifles, the habitual mismeasurement of the practical bearing and the value of things, the readiness to be either delighted or offended on inadequate cause.

Despite this criticism, which some scholars regard as unfounded, Mill praised Bentham as one of the two men (Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the other) to whom England was “indebted not only for the greater part of the important ideas which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men in their time, but for a revolution in its general modes of thought and investigation.” For more than fifty years, Bentham had labored to bring order out of chaos of the English legal system by providing a logical basis for codification that would render the law at once comprehensible and just.

Bentham’s investigation into the legal system, moreover, was so fundamental that his conclusions reached far beyond simple matters of law. The critical scholar saw how the entire fabric of society was interwoven with the law. Hence, he attacked not only laws, courts, and attorneys, but also prisons, poor relief, municipal organizations, rotten boroughs, Parliament, the established clergy, the titled nobility, and the idle landed gentry. Some of his followers would even go so far as advocating the abolition of the monarch; others fought for the principle of a vote for every Englishman.

Even as age overtook Bentham physically, the ideas he had so long espoused were finally becoming accepted by new English political leaders. Reform did not mean revolution, as the emerging politicians understood, so Great Britain in the next decades could carry out change without the turbulence of the French Revolution of 1789. Thanks for this accomplishment, in large measure, should go to a mild little man whose life testified to the notion that the pen and the written word, indeed, were mightier than the sword and its conquests.

Bibliography

Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by John Bowring. 11 vols. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843. These eleven volumes totaling more than sixty-five hundred pages indicate the prodigious output from Bentham’s pen—perhaps in excess of six million words. Including memoirs and selected correspondence, this is the repository where all research on Bentham must start.

Crimmins, James E. On Bentham. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth Learning, 2004. A brief introduction to Bentham’s philosophy by an author who has written several books on utilitarianism.

Englemann, Stephen G. Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Examines Bentham’s ideas about self-interest and public interest to demonstrate how his philosophy forms the basis of contemporary liberalism.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. A classic work that includes a renowned chapter on Bentham and “Panopticism,” the system whereby a prisoner or person otherwise confined “is seen, but he does not see.” Includes notes and a bibliography.

Halevy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1949. Originally published in French in 1901, this is the classic analysis of the emergence of the Benthamites. Halevy remains the acknowledged master of the political history of early Victorian England.

Long, Douglas G. Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation to His Utilitarianism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. The author’s involvement in the Bentham Research Project at University College, London, led him to the mass of unpublished manuscripts held there. From them, Long has concluded that Bentham, in searching for a science of humanity and society, believed that liberty was secondary to security in establishing a plan for social action.

Mack, Mary Peter. Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. In preparing this magisterial biography of Bentham’s first forty-four years, the author examined not only the published sources but also unpublished manuscripts. This is the standard modern study of Bentham but ends with his father’s death and Bentham’s subsequent inheritance. Reference will have to be made to Elie Halevy and John Stuart Mill for insight into the later years.

Mazlish, Bruce. James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1975. This is an important study for understanding the three-way intellectual relationship among Bentham and the two Mills. It offers insights into the personalities as well as the philosophies of the forces behind utilitarianism.

Mill, John Stuart. On Bentham and Coleridge. Edited by F. R. Leavis. New York: G. W. Stewart, 1951. The classic account of Bentham by his intellectual godson and heir, who was himself a leader of the utilitarians. While useful in placing Bentham in his proper perspective as one of England’s premier thinkers, it unfortunately contributes to the notion that he was at times petty. Whatever its shortcomings, it should be consulted by anyone who wants to study Bentham.

Postema, Gerald J. Bentham: Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy. 2 vols. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2002. A collection that offers wide-ranging interpretations of Bentham’s philosophy. The first volume investigates Bentham’s psychology and theories of social welfare, liberty, and democracy. The second volume examines his ideas about the legal system.

Semple, Janet. Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Semple examines and discusses Bentham’s prison reform plan and his political dealings to make the plan a reality.