Bentham. Michael Quinn
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of his central claims. First, that his logic permitted the substitution of the exchange of sense for the exchange of meaningless cant, literal nonsense, in discussion of morality and law; and second for the superiority of his theory – anchored as it was in the real entities of pleasure and pain – over others. Chapter 2 discusses Bentham’s psychology and theory of motivation, and an apparent tension between it and his moral principle. It argues that if that principle coincided with general benevolence, as he often claimed, when it came to practice in the real world the coincidence was with benevolence in a more limited and negative sense. Bentham’s discussion of competing moral principles is reviewed, and his attitude to the problem of measuring sensations investigated. The book does not address the intricacies of Bentham’s theory of law but, instead, in Chapters 3 and 4 develops his distinction between direct and indirect legislation to open the way to discussion of his applications of the utility principle to public policy, which occupies the remaining chapters. Chapter 5 presents Bentham’s subordinate ends of legislation, and his use of them in setting the normative background for his political economy, of which the goal was the maximization of abundance. Other things being equal, an equal distribution maximized happiness but, given established entitlements and the importance of expectation to happiness, other things were almost never equal, and equality is consistently trumped by security for the expectations actually present in societies riven by deep inequalities in property. Chapter 6 shifts the focus to institutional design, and describes Bentham’s attempts to unite agents’ interest with their duty through architecture, transparency and publicity. The chapter reviews the principles of management developed in his panopticon and poor-law writings in terms of the necessary conditions of voluntary action, before concluding with a discussion of Foucault’s complex interpretation of Bentham. Chapter 7 traces the to-and-fro development of Bentham’s views on representative democracy, before providing a sketch of his design for a system of government that combined the knowledge necessary to rule with continuous responsibility to an informed and critical public opinion. It argues on the one hand that Bentham’s enduring fear of popular ignorance led him to exclude the poor from the exercise of governmental power, and on the other that his indefatigable efforts to expose the exercise of that power to relentless public scrutiny provide lessons from which we might still learn. Chapter 8 attempts to shed light on the tension over the scope of the principle of utility identified in Chapter 2 by discussion of Bentham’s efforts to apply it to international law, which finally rely on the potential appeal of negative benevolence to all states, and to the question of colonies, which combined a radical anti-imperialism with a breath-taking disregard for indigenous peoples. Chapter 9 presents a case for Bentham’s continued relevance in an era of widely perceived crisis in governance, and concludes with an examination of the resources available within his theory for addressing the issue of human-induced 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