The study of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the English legal philosopher and reformer, is being transformed by the appearance of volumes in the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham . Following revisionist studies in the 1980s and 1990s that reasserted Bentham's credentials as a key figure in the emergence of the liberal tradition, more recent work has explored an increasingly varied range of topics from the perspective of an increasing variety of disciplines, including literary studies, sociology, and history of political thought, as well as law and philosophy. The view of Bentham as a crude authoritarian behaviorist is no longer tenable, and Bentham's place as a major philosopher with relevance for the twenty-first century is being increasingly recognized.

INTRODUCTION

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the English legal philosopher and reformer, was one of the world's great thinkers: His thought has had a profound historical impact and retains major philosophical significance. In ethics, Bentham was the founder of the modern doctrine of utilitarianism, which claims that the right and proper end of all action is the promotion of the greatest happiness. Utilitarianism has been one of the most influential moral theories of the past two hundred years and, within liberalism, remains the main rival to theories of human rights. Bentham's so-called “felicific calculus” is the inspiration for cost-benefit analysis, which dominates the contemporary discipline of economics. In jurisprudence, the modern doctrine of legal positivism is derived from Bentham's clarification of the distinction between law as it is and law as it ought to be. In his extensive and detailed writings on judicial procedure, Bentham produced the most comprehensive theory of evidence in the Anglo-American tradition. He developed a systematic theory of punishment that emphasized deterrence, proportionality, and the reformation of the offender. His theory of punishment was complemented by a theory of reward—particularly in relation to official pay and the encouragement of economic activity—which was not a recognized field of study before he wrote. In politics, he produced the earliest utilitarian defense of political equality and went on to develop a sophisticated and detailed blueprint for representative democracy within a republican state. Bentham's panopticon prison scheme, given a central place in Michel Foucault's (1977) interpretation of the nature of the modern state, locates Bentham at the heart of debates about what it means to be modern (and postmodern). Bentham put forward a scheme to promote peace between nations, advocating an international court of arbitration and a proportional reduction of armed forces. He argued that the European powers should emancipate their colonies—it was better for both mother country and colonies that the latter should govern themselves. His writings on political economy were an important contribution to the development of classical political economy, he was the first theorist of bureaucracy, and he had an enormous influence on legal and administrative reform more generally in nineteenth-century Britain. His educational ideas, based on useful learning and access for all regardless of religion or gender, were the inspiration for the establishment of the University of London.

Despite these achievements, Bentham has perhaps been the most caricatured of all the great philosophers. He has often been mocked for such matters as the complexity of his sentences, the strangeness of his neologisms, and his attention to detail, such as his design for the cots for the babies admitted into his proposed poorhouses. There has also been a tendency to direct those interested in utilitarianism toward the study of John Stuart Mill. In studies of Mill, Bentham typically receives a few paragraphs in the introduction, with the implication that anything valuable in Bentham will be found more subtly developed and presented in Mill. Since the early 1980s, however, revisionist accounts began to undermine the standard interpretations of Bentham as a crude behaviorist, and hence as a simplistic interpreter of the human condition. In the past decade or so, Bentham studies have been transformed by a new appreciation of both the breadth and depth of Bentham's thought. Put another way, not only is Bentham now being seen as profound rather than banal, but a great deal of his under-researched, or indeed never-researched, material is becoming increasingly accessible. This flourishing of Bentham studies has in large part been stimulated by the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (the Collected Works), which is being prepared by the Bentham Project, University College London, and which is making available for the first time authoritative versions not only of texts previously published but also of texts that have never before been published, and in many cases were unknown.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JEREMY BENTHAM

Twenty-nine volumes of a projected seventy have so far been published in the Collected Works (see sidebar, Transcribe Bentham). Rather than merely confirming well-established views about Bentham's thought, each new volume has offered fresh perspectives and deepened our appreciation of Bentham as both historically influential and philosophically relevant. If one trend more than any other stands out in recent Bentham scholarship, it is the recovery of the real or authentic Bentham, as opposed to the received Bentham. The received Bentham is the Bentham known through the prism of various nineteenth-century editors, most importantly through the French redactions produced by his friend and editor Étienne Dumont. Those redactions were subsequently translated not only into a plethora of foreign languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, but also back into English, particularly in the edition of Bentham's works produced by his literary executor John Bowring within a decade or so of his death (Bentham 1838–1843) (Works). The authentic Bentham, by contrast, is the Bentham who is emerging from the texts produced in the Collected Works, in which the emphasis is on presenting Bentham's writings in the way that he intended.

Transcribe Bentham (TB) is a pioneering crowdsourced transcription initiative, launched to the public in September 2010. TB makes available digital images of unpublished Bentham manuscripts held by the University College London (UCL) library through a transcription interface. As of June 21, 2013, volunteers from around the world had transcribed 5,710 manuscripts (∼2.9 million words), of which 95% have passed a quality control check. Volunteer-produced transcripts are uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository to ensure long-term digital access. They will also act as a starting point for Bentham Project staff when producing future volumes of the Collected Works (volunteers will be fully acknowledged in the volumes to which they contribute). TB is hosted by UCL's Bentham Project and is produced in association with UCL's Center for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Creative Media Services, and the University of London Computer Centre. For two years from October 1, 2012, the project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the British Library joining the project consortium. To take part in TB, visit the Transcription Desk (http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham). The digital Bentham Papers repository is available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/bentham. The latest news about the project can be found at the TB blog (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham).

The need for a properly edited collection of Bentham's writings that would supersede the Bowring edition was recognized in the 1930s, when University College London, the custodian of 60,000 folios of Bentham's papers (the British Library holds a further 12,500), established the Bentham Manuscripts Committee to oversee the task. Before any significant progress could be made, the Second World War intervened, and it was not until the late 1950s that a new Bentham Committee was convened and serious work began (Schofield 2009b). The initial emphasis was on Bentham's correspondence, which now constitutes twelve volumes in the Collected Works, covering the period up to the middle of 1828 (Bentham 1968–2006), and on early writings on ethics and jurisprudence, including Bentham's (1970a) most famous work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Another well-known text published early in the edition was A Fragment on Government, which appeared with the related “A Comment on the Commentaries”(Bentham 1977): Both works took William Blackstone's [2002 (1765–1769)] classic statement of English law, Commentaries on the Laws of England, for their target. Volumes in the Collected Works have dealt with such themes as psychology and ethics (Bentham 1983c), education (Bentham 1983a), colonies (Bentham 1995), codification (Bentham 1998), the mode of procedure in legislative assemblies (Bentham 1999), Bentham's political thought at the time of the French Revolution (Bentham 2002), and his later democratic thought (Bentham 1983b, 1989, 1990, 1993). I will restrict my detailed discussion here to several of the recently published volumes.

Bentham's theory of law is expounded in Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence (Bentham 2010a). This volume replaces Of Laws in General (Bentham 1970b), edited by the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, which unfortunately contained numerous transcription errors (a booklet of errata had to be issued soon after publication) and, much more seriously, conflated different drafts of several key chapters, rendering the text virtually nonsensical in places. The new edition presents the text as Bentham originally conceived it, that is, as the seventeenth chapter in continuation of the text that became An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham 1970a). Together, these texts formed part of an introduction for a penal code, to the composition of which Bentham devoted himself through much of the 1770s and 1780s. As well as presenting the final draft of the text of Limits, the volume also reconstructs several earlier drafts, which were obscured by Hart's editorial methods. It has, moreover, become clear that Bentham did not complete the text to his own satisfaction, and he appears to have abandoned it, together with other projected chapters for the introduction to the penal code, in or around 1782. Limits remains, nevertheless, one of the most important texts in the history of legal philosophy. It contains, for instance, the earliest detailed application of Bentham's newly invented branch of logic—the logic of the will as he termed it, or deontic logic as it is now known; the application of Bentham's new method of linguistic exposition—paraphrasis—to abstract legal terms; and new conceptions of both the relationship between the various branches of law and the relationship of law and legislation to morality and opinion. This text is, as Hart (1982) himself recognized, the birthplace of modern legal theory.

Bentham's Writings on the Poor Laws (Bentham 2001, 2010b) present for the first time definitive and complete texts relating to his scheme to provide poor relief on a national scale in a way that was affordable and, by not draining increasing amounts of money out of the productive economy, would not tend to exacerbate the problem it was meant to solve. In the mid-1790s, when Britain was faced with the economic dislocation caused by war with Revolutionary France and a series of bad harvests, the existing provision for poor relief, consisting in a ramshackle set of expedients funded by poor rates, came under enormous strain. Bentham proposed a network of 250 panopticon poorhouses, each holding up to 2,000 paupers, run by a private joint-stock organization called the National Charity Company, to which those persons who considered themselves in need of relief—the short-term unemployed as well as those unable to work or make an adequate living owing to ill health or some other incapacity—could admit themselves. The paupers would be put to work until such time as they had paid off the costs that the Company had incurred in feeding and sheltering them, at which point they would be free to leave. The exceptions were orphaned children and children whom parents voluntarily handed over to the care of the Company. Such children would be apprenticed to the Company and not allowed to leave until they were 21 years of age in the case of males, 19 in the case of females. It was from the labor of this group (once its members had entered their teenage years) that Bentham expected to make his greatest profit, and it was on their shoulders that the financial viability of the Company as a whole would rest. In 1798, however, he abandoned his scheme. One difficulty was his inability to provide the government with convincing financial estimates, as reliable data concerning the pauper population and its age profile were simply unavailable. But the critical issue may have been that highlighted by Robert Malthus [1992 (1798)] when in that same year he published (initially anonymously) An Essay on the Principle of Population, namely, that population growth tended to outstrip the supply of food. Bentham may have realized that his encouragement of marriage and the procreation of ever increasing numbers of children by his apprentices would eventually be self-defeating in terms of the Company's economic viability.

One of the major debates in Bentham studies in the late twentieth century was between those who saw Bentham as an authoritarian, or more particularly as a behaviorist with no regard for human dignity (Himmelfarb 1968, Manning 1968, Bahmueller 1981), and those who saw him as a liberal (Rosen 1983, Kelly 1990). Adherents of the former interpretation have tended to point to Bentham's writings on the panopticon prison and poor laws as evidence in support of their claim. Those who defend the latter interpretation might point to the most recent Collected Works volume, Of the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion and Other Legal and Political Writings for Spain and Portugal (Bentham 2012), as evidence of Bentham's liberal credentials. The essays contained in this volume represent Bentham's attempt to influence the direction of political and constitutional change taking place in Spain and Portugal following the restoration in 1820 of the liberal Constitution of Cadiz, which had originally been promulgated in 1812. Focusing on Spain in particular, Bentham was concerned that political leaders there were intent on reintroducing royal despotism, rather than promoting further democratic reform. In “On the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion” (published in 1821), Bentham provided a critique of a proposed Spanish decree to regulate political meetings and offered a vigorous general defense of free speech and communication. He argued there should be no censorship, and in the case of prosecution for defamation, the truth of the imputation should constitute a defense (replicating the legal position at the time in the United States, but not in England). “Spaniards!” he exclaimed, “behold then the difference between a government that is despotic, and one that is not so. In an undespotic government, some eventual faculty of effectual resistance, and consequent change in government, is purposely left, or rather given, to the people” (Bentham 2012, p. 29, emphasis in original). In “Three Tracts relative to Spanish and Portugueze Affairs” (published in 1821), he contrasted his own principles of constitutional design with certain principles enshrined in the Cadiz constitution, whereas in “Letters to Count Toreno” (published in 1822), he contrasted his own theory of penal law and principles of codification with provisions contained in a proposed Spanish penal code. The volume complements the essays in Colonies, Commerce, and Constitutional Law (Bentham 1995), which were also written during the early 1820s and in which Bentham commented on the disastrous effects on Spain of her attempts to retain her overseas possessions.

Further evidence of Bentham's liberal outlook appears in Church-of-Englandism and Its Catechism Examined (Bentham 2011a), a long and complex work that was printed in 1817 and published in 1818 and was part of the sustained attack on England's political, legal, and ecclesiastical establishments mounted by Bentham following his commitment to political radicalism in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The focus of the work is the educational practice of the Church of England, particularly in the schools sponsored by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, throughout England and Wales, an organ of the Church of England, where, claimed Bentham, the catechism of the Church was substituted in place of the Bible as the standard of right and wrong, and hence the religion of the Church of England substituted in place of the religion of Jesus. The purpose of the Church's system of education, according to Bentham, was to instill habits of insincerity into the population at large. The Church had an interest in promoting moral depravity, in order to protect abuses that were profitable both to the clergy and to the ruling classes in general. Bentham recommended the “euthanasia” of the Church, whereby incumbents would not be replaced when they died and Church property would be gradually sold off in order to reduce taxation. If “religionists” wished to retain the services of a priest of religion, then they themselves, and not taxpayers, should bear the expense (taxation was a form of coercion and hence an evil, justified only where a greater good ensued).

READING BENTHAM

There is no authoritative biography of Bentham, and given the discoveries still being made in Bentham's manuscripts, there is not likely to be one for several years yet. The best short introduction to Bentham's life and thought from a historical perspective remains Dinwiddy (1989, 2004), although a more thematic introduction is Schofield (2009a). In it, I briefly sketch Bentham's career, before explaining the editorial principles that underlie the Collected Works. I explain Bentham's conception of the principle of utility and try to provide refutations, from Bentham's perspective, of some of the standard criticisms made against his utilitarianism. The remainder of the book is devoted to topical aspects of Bentham's thought, including his panopticon prison and poorhouse schemes, his classification of fallacious political argument, his condemnation of Christian sexual morality (discussed in more detail below), and his limited defense of judicially sanctioned torture.

A further problem facing those who wished to orient themselves within Bentham studies, or else to find suitable material with which to teach Bentham, was the lack of a Bentham reader. That want has now been admirably supplied by Stephen Engelmann's edition of Bentham's Selected Writings (Bentham 2011b). The volume contains a selection of texts taken mainly from the Collected Works, but also two important works that I have edited from the Bentham manuscripts specifically for Engelmann's volume. One is “Time and Place,” which contains a remarkably nuanced discussion of the factors that need to be considered when attempting to transplant laws from one county to another and, like Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, was intended as a chapter in the introduction to Bentham's penal code. The other is “Sex,” which contains a highly provocative demand for sexual liberty—in short, according to Bentham, no consensual sexual practice should be either made illegal or condemned on the grounds of taste or decency. The volume also contains a helpful introduction, as well as four specialist essays on various aspects of Bentham studies by Mark Canuel, Jennifer Pitts, David Lieberman, and me. Each of these essays represents, to some degree or another, the new directions taken by recent Bentham studies, in many cases building upon, but also going beyond, the debate on the liberal as opposed to the authoritarian Bentham. I will take each of these essays in turn as a starting point for a wider discussion of recent work in the respective areas that they cover, with a digression into the debate surrounding panopticism.

BENTHAM AND LITERATURE

Canuel (2011) investigates the opposition that is traditionally drawn between Bentham's utilitarianism and English Romanticism. In contrast to the standard interpretation, which associates the former with accumulating facts and rational action, and thence with the communal, the empirical, and the mechanical, and the latter with the imagination and freedom of will, and thence with the individual, the ideal, and the spiritual, Canuel argues that the relationship is far more subtle. He suggests, for instance, that Byron's Don Juan, in freeing the oppressed from oppressing authority figures, “is in many respects the embodiment of Benthamite liberalism” (Canuel 2011, p. 505) and that William Blake's condemnation of the hypocrisy of the Church of England finds its counterpart in Bentham's Church-of-Englandism. Bentham's schemes for legal, political, religious, and educational reform were not aimed at imposing some preconceived social structure on passive subjects with a view to forcing them to be happy, but rather at providing a social framework in which they could pursue the life plans that they were thereby encouraged to invent for themselves. Bentham was critical not of poetry as such, as he is often taken to be (probably because of his remark that push-pin is as good as poetry if it produces an equal amount of pleasure), but of its being put to self-serving uses. Canuel (2011, p. 515) concludes that “Bentham was more of a ‘poetical philosopher’ than most scholars have previously thought.”

Canuel's theme is more broadly developed by Blake (2009), a fascinating account of the relationship between utilitarianism and Victorian literature that similarly subverts the standard view—which, according to Blake, originated with F.R. Leavis—that presents them as antagonistic. Blake uses the notion of pleasure to show that a number of classics of Victorian literature, far from being opposed to utilitarianism and the “dismal science” of political economy, in fact promoted utilitarian values and endorsed the reforming and modernizing impulse that motivated Bentham's followers, the philosophic radicals. Blake's portrayal of Charles Dickens's Bleak House is particularly striking in this respect: Dickens's attack on legal delays and costs, and the ensuing miseries, is the literary equivalent of Bentham's condemnation of English legal procedure and English law more generally (see particularly “Indications respecting Lord Eldon” in Bentham 1993), and Dickens's attack on aristocratic rule and male hegemony, as well as his promotion of self-interest and self-development at the expense of Christian asceticism and self-abnegation, was again a counterpart to Bentham's political radicalism and religious skepticism. More generally, the promotion of education, work, and the saving of capital were notions inculcated as much by Bleak House as by the political economists. Blake goes on to argue, contrary to the received wisdom that the headmaster Gradgrind in Hard Times personifies all that is wrong with utilitarianism, that Dickens's point is that Gradgrind is in fact not Benthamite enough, in that he misses the point that pleasure is derivable from pastime as well as from business. As Bentham argued in Chrestomathia (Bentham 1983a), education should provide learners with both the skills and knowledge necessary to pursue a vocation and the potential to develop the interests and hobbies that would enable them to enjoy their leisure time—ennui was the great enemy to human happiness. From her consideration not only of Dickens, but also of such seminal texts as George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, from a utilitarian perspective, Blake (2009, p. 7) concludes that “a view takes shape of a broadly Benthamite, capitalist, and liberal age in pursuit of utility alike in commerce and industry and in socio-economic-political reforms, in good measure favourable to freedom and levelling in terms of class and gender.”

Shifting the focus from literature to politics and economics, Engelmann (2003a) similarly undermines the view of Benthamite utilitarianism as a modern form of philistinism by examining the role of the imagination in Bentham's philosophy. His theme is the emergence of monistic interest—that is, the reduction of all values into a single commensurable value—in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English political thought, which, he claims, constitutes the foundation of contemporary liberal political theory, even though most contemporary liberals, and their critics, have failed to recognize this. Although Engelmann sketches the implications that such a recognition might have for political theory, his main purpose is to analyze the nature and historical development of monistic interest and differentiate it from other traditions that are usually afforded more attention in accounts of liberal thought. In other words, he deals with the emergence of utilitarianism as a major political theory, and its subversion of conceptions of natural law and civic humanism as the basis for social cooperation.

According to Engelmann, the paradigmatic theorist of monistic interest is Bentham, whose utilitarianism calls for the maximization of pleasure by both individuals and the state. Yet, argues Engelmann, Bentham's philosophy has been too quickly dismissed as a crude materialism with antiliberal tendencies because commentators have not recognized the significance of the imagination in his thought. The pleasures that the Benthamic individual is encouraged to pursue are located in the future and a product of his or her own desires or imaginings—hence, the securing of expectations occupies a central place in his thought. The point is that the ideology of monistic interest encourages individuals to conduct themselves according to an economic model. They see themselves as repositories of capital and have the aim of maximizing that capital. The state is not outside the claims of interest, as it is in traditional models of sovereignty in which the sovereign is conceived as acting upon the people but is itself subject to the disciplines of interest. According to Shaftesbury, argues Engelmann, pleasure results when human experience “fits” with a “landscape” within the self, which is, as it were, installed by nature. According to Bentham, the landscape is itself a human construction, a product of the imagination, and thus subject to changing specifications. The landscape is government—not just the state, which obviously forms an important part of government, but the totality of regulatory mechanisms: We imagine the landscape, and pleasure results when experience fits the landscape. There are echoes here of Foucault and governmentality, which are discussed below.

Engelmann (2003b) deals with the relationship between liberal and authoritarian government, on one hand, and legislative interference or noninterference with the freedom of the individual, on the other. Using Bentham's ideas on indirect legislation, and in particular Bentham's proposal that everyone should display an identification tattoo, Engelmann challenges the prevalent assumption that a liberal government can be defined as a government that does not interfere with the activities of the individual. By contrast, he shows that it is Bentham's view that the existence of government creates the conditions in which people can be said to be free, or to enjoy their liberty. The aim of government is to create security, in other words, a framework in which individuals can build stable expectations (whether about their personal safety or their property) and hence possess the freedom to make choices about their lives and, in short, to live a civilized existence. The inference that might be drawn is that those who think they are defending civil liberties by opposing governmental interference have simply misunderstood the nature of their task: If government interferes by providing individuals with more information about their fellow citizens (and indeed about the activities of government itself), then this sort of interference will enhance liberty. It is ignorance that breeds criminality, which is the true enemy of liberty.

Themes from the work of Engelmann and Blake are echoed in Quinn's (2013) complex and fascinating study of the influence of utilitarian thought, and of Bentham in particular, on the introduction of publicly funded art education in nineteenth-century Britain. The key events in Quinn's account are, first, the establishment of the House of Commons Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835–1836, which was dominated by followers of Bentham, in particular Bowring and William Ewart, and led to the establishment of the government-funded School of Design and, second, the reforms introduced by Henry Cole after the School came under his control in 1852. Quinn points out that Bentham regarded the notion of good taste as a device used by the aristocracy or ruling elite to support their power and privileges. Aristocratic good taste found its institutional embodiment in the Royal Academy. Although Bentham followed Adam Smith in many areas of political economy, this was not the case in relation to the teaching of art: As far as Bentham was concerned, art was an area in which government needed to be involved. The School of Design, therefore, given its Benthamite origins, might have been expected to provide a clear, utilitarian alternative to the Royal Academy. Quinn argues, however, that, influenced by the laissez-faire principles associated with Smith and, therefore, excluding any role for the legislator, Bowring and Ewart accepted the standards provided by custom and convention in matters of taste, and this approach was mirrored in the founding principles of the School of Design. It was only when Cole, more sympathetic to Bentham's position, came to control the School that a more radical agenda was adopted. Questions of taste were subordinated to questions of utility, legislative involvement was encouraged, and some distance was placed between the publicly funded institution and the Royal Academy. Quinn goes on to argue that Bentham's radical utilitarian agenda for the art school is as relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century.

BENTHAM, FOUCAULT, AND FRANCE

Blake (2009) regards as absurd the attempt to link Dickens's critique of law in Bleak House with Foucault's (1977) critique of panopticism in Discipline and Punish. French scholars have recently undertaken some important revisionist work in relation to Foucault's interpretation of Bentham and in doing so have attempted to go, as the title of a recent collection of essays states, Beyond Foucault (Brunon-Ernst 2012a). This collection is the product of scholars associated with the Centre Bentham established in Paris in 2003. (I will not deal here with the recent outpouring of contributions to Bentham studies in French, but suffice it to say that members of the Centre Bentham have been active in producing new French translations of Bentham's works and an impressive array of secondary literature on Bentham and in establishing the online Revue d'études benthamiennes.) Foucault drew attention to Bentham's panopticon prison scheme as an emblem that captured certain central features of industrial society, and in particular the exercise of new and subtle modes of supervision, control, and correction of subject-workers. The panopticon, or more precisely panopticism (Foucault's term for the system of rule that the panopticon represented), has been equated with the worst features of the surveillance society, and this has reinforced the view of Bentham himself as authoritarian, antiliberal, behaviorist, reductionist, and totalitarian. Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, this left-wing quasi-Marxist critique of Bentham echoes the right-wing libertarian critique mentioned above that gained some prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the contributors to Beyond Foucault tread a well-worn path for Bentham scholars in showing that Bentham's thought consisted of much more than a plan for a prison and that the panopticon was not regarded by Bentham himself as a model for utilitarian society as a whole, the more interesting aspect of this collection is that it shows that Foucault had a much more subtle and profound appreciation of Bentham than the mass of commentators on the panopticon, panopticism, or the myriad other derivative terms that have been coined have realized.

Particularly enlightening is Laval (2012), who shows how Foucault was influenced by Bentham when developing his conception of power and hence his conception of governmentality, obscurely defined as “the conduct of conduct” but alluding to all the means by which behavior is influenced. Laval's point is that, for Foucault, Bentham was much more than the designer of a prison. Foucault accepted that utilitarianism was a liberal theory that asked whether government was acting in a way that was useful and hence distinct from the strand of liberalism that asked whether government was respecting or infringing natural rights. Foucault believed that interests, and not theories of rights, were the key to understanding modern society and hence viewed the panopticon as a calculating device for weighing up interests. For Foucault, according to Laval (2012, p. 57), “Bentham is not only the technologist of disciplines, but also the theorist of power.” The panopticon was merely one instantiation of a wider phenomenon—the exercise of power in “the utopia of a society of mutual control” (p. 60).

Another highlight of the collection is Cléro's (2012) essay, which turns out not to be focused so much on Foucault and the panopticon but rather on Bentham's (1827) massive (3,500 pages or so) but sadly neglected Rationale of Judicial Evidence, edited by the youthful John Stuart Mill and published in 1827. Although not entirely convincing in his claim that Bentham's instruction to judges, when weighing up evidence, to decide according to probabilities amounts to a rejection of the notion of truth, Cléro does great service in drawing attention to the role of truth and its relationship to utility in Bentham's philosophy. This is surely a topic that is ripe for further, detailed consideration. The thrust of several of the other essays in the volume is that the panopticon prison is not Benthamite society in miniature and that panopticon architecture manifests itself in various forms and is applied to various purposes in Bentham's thought, more particularly, the pauper panopticon in the 1790s, the school panopticon in the 1810s, and the reverse-panopticon of the 1820s, in which officials working in the center of the minister's audience chamber would be exposed to the view of the public, who would occupy waiting boxes on the periphery.

Brunon-Ernst (2012b) has combined her interest in both Bentham and Foucault to produce an original attempt to reconcile their ideas. She argues that Foucault's notion of biopolitics, which amounts to his theory of power, needs to be complemented by Bentham's hedonistic utilitarianism, with its notion of interests based on pleasures and pains, in order to render it complete. Her argument is that, far from being a strained and artificial welding together of two thinkers who, because of the traditional emphasis on Foucault's critique of the panopticon, are usually regarded as diametrically opposed, this reconstruction makes sense because Foucault himself “assimilated Bentham's utilitarianism when forging his theories on government” (Brunon-Ernst 2012b, p. 1). It is certainly true that power was a central concept for Bentham and that, like Foucault, he saw it not merely as a straightforward projection from ruler to subject, but rather as infusing all action and hence all social relations. The two thinkers are also linked by their respective analyses of pleasure, and so Brunon-Ernst's attempt at reconciliation is not without plausibility.

Continuing the theme of Bentham and France, and indeed of Bentham and panopticon, Blamires (2008) has provided a detailed and elaborate account of Bentham's relationship with his Genevan friend and editor Dumont, or perhaps more accurately, Dumont's relationship with Bentham, as Dumont is in many respects the central focus of the book. Bentham became famous throughout Europe and the Americas thanks to the appearance in 1802 of Traités de législation civile et pénale (Bentham 1802), the first of five redactions of Bentham's works produced by Dumont—this was the work that “created a global reputation for Bentham” (Blamires 2008, p. 1). Blamires argues that the Bentham presented by Dumont was at best a partial, one-sided Bentham. Dumont was a significant political figure in his own right, being close to Mirabeau in France and to Shelburne and the reform-minded Whigs in England, and of course a leading figure in his native Geneva, and hence had his own agenda, to which he found Bentham's ideas, or at least some part of them, conducive. In the midst of the trauma of the French Revolution, Dumont was looking for a means to rebuild Europe in general, and Geneva in particular, in a way that was liberal but not revolutionary, and he found the answer in Bentham's science of legislation. [Whatmore (2007) also argues that Dumont saw in Bentham's science of legislation a means of reconciling legal and political reform with domestic and international peace.] In contrast somewhat to the French scholars who have contributed to Beyond Foucault, Blamires (2008, p. 2) argues that Bentham's thought is encapsulated in the principles that underlay the design of the panopticon prison, namely, “transparency, economy, and accountability,” which, transferred to the social system as a whole, shows that good governance consists in economic calculation and hence the maximization of benefits and the minimization of costs. This, for Blamires, makes Bentham relevant for the problems facing twenty-first-century governments. According to Blamires, the centrality of panopticon to Bentham's thought was obscured by Dumont, who represented it as a useful design for a prison and not as the embodiment of a much broader philosophy, and when it was rediscovered in the 1960s by libertarians, and in the 1970s by Foucault, it was presented “in the skewed and misleading guise of an Orwellian nightmare” (p. 2). It is extraordinary, in Blamires's view, that panopticon, and hence Bentham, became associated with totalitarianism, when its whole point was transparency, reified (or at least it would have been reified if a true panopticon had ever been built) in its glass and iron architecture. Whether or not this book is regarded as a definitive account of the authentic Bentham, it retains great value in the contribution it makes to our knowledge and understanding of Dumont's career between his first meeting with Bentham in 1788 and the publication of Traités de législation in 1802. There is no doubt that panopticon was of great biographical significance for Bentham, given that he spent a decade or more attempting to build a panopticon prison (the whole depressing story is engagingly recounted by Semple 1993) and that it was the source of many of the principles of administration that he came to adopt in his mature constitutional theory (Hume 1981), but its philosophical significance as a paradigm of utilitarian society should not be exaggerated.

GLOBAL BENTHAM

Pitts (2011) takes up the theme of Bentham's attitude toward colonialism and empire (more broadly developed in Pitts 2005). She contrasts the nonjudgmental views of Bentham with those of his later followers in the utilitarian tradition, especially John Stuart Mill, and with those of more recent liberals, who have assumed that Europeans—or the West, or liberalism as a creed—have the right answers to moral and political questions and a duty to impose democracy or what they consider to be good governance on those states perceived to be more ignorant or less advanced in civilization. “Bentham's perhaps surprising humility,” Pitts (2011, p. 492) notes, “and his insistence on both the reasonableness of diverse customs and the illegitimacy of imposing one's judgments on others, may serve as a helpful corrective to the persistent liberal temptation to liberate others by ‘improving’ them so that they are more like ourselves.” The difference between Bentham and Mill is shown to be a product of the former's emphasis on interests and circumstances and the latter's on character, whether individual or national. Mill famously criticized Bentham for his lack of insight into character, but in Pitts' view, this was not the result of some blindness or immaturity on Bentham's part, but of a consistent philosophical approach that did not privilege the pleasures of one set of people over those of another. (This attitude is closely related to Bentham's stance against claims to infallibility, which he thought were inherent in irrevocable laws or declarations of natural rights; see Schwarzberg 2007.) Although not entirely consistently throughout his long career, Bentham condemned colony holding time and time again, on account of the expense of maintaining overseas possessions, their tendency to produce war, and the impossibility of governing well at a great distance: “Europeans…could not possibly imagine the lives, desires, and problems of subjects, whether of European descent or not, thousands of miles away” (Pitts 2011, p. 484; see also Cain 2011). Pitts draws attention to passages in “Place and Time” that were excluded from the original nineteenth-century version of the text, in which Bentham was critical of British law and practices and hence avoided the claims to cultural superiority associated with the liberal imperialists of the nineteenth century.

The corruption of Bentham's text of “Place and Time” is taken up by Engelmann & Pitts (2011) in a special number of The Tocqueville Review devoted to Bentham studies. They undertake a detailed textual comparison of the French version of the text edited by Dumont for Traités de législation (Bentham 1802), the English version edited by Richard Smith for the Bowring edition (Bentham 1838–1843), and the version that I edited for Selected Writings (Bentham 2011b) with the aim of reproducing the text as faithfully as possible in line with Bentham's intentions. The instances in which the work betrays a sense of cultural superiority turn out to have been interpolations introduced by Dumont/Smith, and other passages that criticize English institutions and practices were excluded by Dumont/Smith. Engelmann and Pitts note that Bentham recognized that whatever practices existed in a community had to be taken into account by any science of legislation. The universalism in Bentham was restricted to the psychological fact that human beings were motivated by a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain and that the right and proper object of human action everywhere was the promotion of happiness. Yet beyond that, Bentham recognized that different individuals found pleasure and pain in different activities and that important elements within these differences were a result of cultural conditioning.

The theme of Bentham's universalism, in the context of a growing interest in the development of “a global history of political thought,” has been taken up by Armitage (2011). In Armitage's view, Bentham was a figure “who attempted to conceive the world, its peoples and its policies holistically” (p. 64). By the time of his death in 1832, Bentham had acquired a global reputation, thanks in the main to the redactions of Dumont, who had attempted to add to Bentham's wider appeal by stripping out the more particularistic elements in his thought. As Armitage points out, Bentham's own work had both universalistic and particularistic elements, and there was often a complex interplay between them. A significant example of this interplay is Bentham's role in the debate on the American Revolution. At that time, he was developing his notion of a universal jurisprudence based on the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which he regarded as a genuinely universal principle. Yet the apparently more theoretical issues that this project involved, such as the proper exposition of key legal terms, had a direct bearing on the particular question of the legality of the American cause. Armitage (2011, p. 69) argues that Bentham himself regarded his first major published work, A Fragment on Government of 1776, “as the product of a global moment in British and human history” and hence reads it as a contribution to the debate on the American Revolution, most obviously seen perhaps in Bentham's interest in the question of the juncture of resistance.

Armitage then turns his attention to Bentham's interest in international law, a term that Bentham (1970a) himself coined in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham was dissatisfied with the term law of nations, which he considered to be more likely to raise the image of internal law than that of law between nations. Rejecting theories of natural law as an adequate basis for international law, Bentham saw the principle of utility as the only foundation for “a truly cosmopolitan, universal law of nations” (Armitage 2011, p. 75). In the 1780s, Bentham recognized the problem of self-interested sovereigns pursuing the greatest happiness of their own communities and looked to an international code of law that would promote the greatest happiness of all nations taken together. The question of international law reemerged in Bentham's thought in the 1820s when he used his genuinely universalist utilitarianism to oppose a resurgence in a version of the natural law doctrine that had become narrowed down to what Armitage calls “a particularistic universalism” (p. 82)—in other words, a conception of international law committed to exporting what it saw as European, Christian, civilized values to the rest of the world (echoing Pitts' criticism of the liberal imperialists). Armitage concludes that more research is needed in order better to understand the source of Bentham's universalism.

CODIFICATION AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Lieberman (2011) deals with Bentham's plans for codification and its relationship to his later democratic theory. He points out that codification, with all that it implied for legal and political reform, was a central concern throughout Bentham's career. Rejecting customary law, and in particular English common law, Bentham believed that it was necessary to devise a complete code of laws, which he termed a pannomion, consisting of civil, penal, constitutional, and procedural branches. “The body of the law would be distinguished by the comprehensiveness of its design and by the systematic unity of its goals, method, and form of presentation” (Lieberman 2011, p. 462). Bentham believed that he could achieve his aim by adopting a natural, as opposed to a technical, arrangement of jurisprudence. The starting point was the exposition of the term offense as an action that caused harm, in other words, inflicted pain on an individual, a group of individuals, or the whole community. Bentham's aim was to replace the obscurities, inconsistencies, and confusions of the common law, under which no one could be certain of their rights and duties and hence how to conduct themselves, with a clear, consistent, and comprehensible system of law. The key was linguistic precision and clarity and adequate promulgation. This could be achieved only by legislation, as opposed to the judge-made common law, which Bentham likened to “dog law”—your dog, in your yard, did something you did not want it to do, and so you beat it, and thereupon every other dog in the neighborhood was supposed to know how to conduct itself in future.

Bentham's ideas on codification have previously been explored in detail (Postema 1986, Lieberman 1989, Lobban 1991, Schofield 1998), but a valuable feature of Lieberman's essay is that he highlights the changes to Bentham's strategy for codification that resulted from his embrace of radical democratic reform in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Bentham had always believed that his codes were universally applicable, albeit with suitable local variations—after all, the key element of human psychology, a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain, was universal. Bentham then came to recognize, however, that the major obstacle to the adoption of the pannomion lay in political corruption and that only a representative democracy had an interest in establishing a utilitarian legal system. As Lieberman points out, the constitutional code came to be the linchpin of Bentham's legislative project. This also led Bentham to lay greater stress on the rationale that would be integrated within the pannomion—legislators would not only enact laws, but also give reasons for them, that is, show how they would promote the greatest happiness. The rationale would serve as a bulwark against misrule and provide a basis for the discussion of the merits of legislative action among members of the public. The key to preventing corruption was transparency, which in turn required new techniques of record keeping and public access to those records. Hence, Bentham came to exploit the pannomion as a device that would serve democratic accountability.

The history of Bentham's decision to embrace political radicalism between 1803 and 1809, and then republicanism around 1818, is recounted by Schofield (2006). In it, I claim that the foundation of Bentham's thought is not his utilitarianism, as is so often assumed, but rather his ontology and his related views on logic and language. Bentham's moral philosophy was naturalistic, and hence revisionist interpretations that have suggested that Bentham did not derive an “is” from an “ought” are mistaken, no matter how much more attractive their interpretations might make Bentham appear to late twentieth-century philosophers. For Bentham, if morality was not founded on some natural fact about the world, in his case the existence of feelings of pleasure and pain, then it was an empty notion. I attempt to provide a framework for understanding the development of Bentham's political thought, and hence for understanding Bentham's career more generally. It has been well documented that Bentham began to write on parliamentary reform in 1809 and that his conversion, or more modestly, his transition, to political radicalism occurred in 1808–1809 (Dinwiddy 1975). My central thesis is that the critical distinction between the early, politically quiescent Bentham and the later, politically active Bentham lay in his systematic development of the notion of sinister interest—the view that the ruling classes had an interest that was opposed to the interest of the community as a whole. In other words, the ruling classes did all they could to promote their own selfish interests, whatever the result, usually detrimental, for the universal interest. The notion of sinister interest emerged in Bentham's thought in systematic form in writings on the reform of judicial evidence and procedure to which he turned following the bitter disappointment that he felt at the effective collapse of the panopticon prison scheme in 1803. When Bentham began to write on parliamentary reform in the summer of 1809, triggered by a speech given in the House of Commons by his stepbrother Charles Abbot, he began to apply his theory of sinister interest, developed in the context of a critique of the legal establishment, to the political and ecclesiastical establishments. He still accepted, however, that utilitarian codes of penal and civil law could be introduced under any political regime, and it was not until a decade or so later that he came to the conclusion that only a representative democracy had an interest in carrying out such reforms. From that moment, he became a republican and devoted much of the remainder of his life to drafting his monumental Constitutional Code (Bentham 1983b)—although it did not stop him from also getting heavily involved in law reform and a myriad of other schemes. (Some of Bentham's concerns in this final decade of his life are explored in detail by Crimmins 2011.)

LEGAL PHILOSOPHY

Schofield (2011b) deals with Bentham's legal theory, and in particular the question of the relationship of his thought to the contemporary doctrine of legal positivism. Bentham is often stated to be the founder of this doctrine, on account of his distinction between law as it is and law as it ought to be, which, it is assumed, maps onto a distinction between descriptive and normative statements about law. I investigate the standard criticism, associated with Moore [1993 (1901)], that Bentham committed grave philosophical errors in attempting to derive an “ought” from an “is” (the naturalistic fallacy) and in arguing that good consisted in pleasure (the definist fallacy). As already noted, I take the view that Bentham did place his ethics on a naturalistic basis, but I also argue that, from Bentham's perspective, it was just because the principle of utility rested on a factual or naturalistic basis that rendered it true, and rendered other moral theories that did not have this basis false. I also argue that Bentham did not commit a definist fallacy, as his philosophy of logic and language did not rely on definition, but rather on the exposition of terms by means of paraphrasis, whereby propositions containing abstract terms were resolved into propositions about physical existence. Schofield (2010) takes up the implications of this interpretation for Bentham's legal philosophy. Hart, whose work (criticized and revised by Postema 1986) has dominated the reception of Bentham among legal philosophers, identified a utilitarian tradition in jurisprudence, which he associated with Bentham and John Austin, consisting of three doctrines: the separation of law and morals, the analysis of legal concepts, and the imperative theory of law. By contrast, I argue that Bentham did not adopt a positivist conception of law that insisted on the separation of law and morals. Hart, moreover, misinterpreted Bentham's approach to the analysis of language. Hart was wrong to assume that Bentham's jurisprudential project was a precursor to his own attempt to provide a morally neutral description of a legal system. Bentham's whole approach was governed by a commitment to the principle of utility. A general point I make is that Bentham put forward a unified theory: There was only one physical world and hence only one source of knowledge; there were not competing domains of fact and value, of brain and mind, or of matter and spirit. The tendency of contemporary philosophy is to contrast fact with value; Bentham would have contrasted fact with fiction. Fact and value were not separable but represented two different ways of speaking about the same physical world—it was more a case of whether it was useful to emphasize the past, present, or future physical reality without explicit reference to pleasure and pain (statement of fact) or with such explicit reference (statement of value). I am inclined to think that a serious reexamination of Bentham's legal theory will show that the gloss put by Hart and his twentieth-century followers upon his distinction between what the law is and what the law ought to be is a product of their commitment to the conceptual separation of fact and value and that such a separation would not have made sense to Bentham, because fact and value were inseparably associated.

A more practical application (and appreciation) of Bentham's legal thought is found in Resnik & Curtis (2011) and Resnik's (2011) related article. They study the relationship between artistic representation, architecture, adjudication, and democracy, themes whose importance were all recognized by Bentham. Resnik and Curtis are concerned about the marginalization of open court proceedings in modern democracies, as adjudicative roles are increasingly devolved to administrative agencies and outsourced to private providers, with a view to encouraging private (and hence secret) conciliation. The problem is that such a trend damages democracy, as the theater of open court proceedings acts as a constraint on both state and private power. Bentham's significance, for Resnik and Curtis, is as a defender of publicity in court procedure on the grounds that it promotes the forthcomingness of evidence, serves as a means of educating the public, and helps secure good behavior on the part of judges. From Bentham's point of view, legislators and judges are to be subjected to publicity as a check upon their sinister interest. Codification would bring clarity and cognoscibility to the law, and expensive and technical procedure (which required arcane legal knowledge) would be replaced by a natural procedure by which parties could take their grievances directly to a judge sitting in a local judicatory, with oral evidence, cross-examination, and speedy decision. Resnik and Curtis are less optimistic than Bentham about the benefits of publicity, but they see Bentham's ideas as providing at the very least a useful and relevant source of criticism of an important, but unwelcome, trend in contemporary legal practice.

Sokol (2011) explores Bentham's writings on the law of marriage, which turn out to be detailed, subtle, and, as one might expect, radical, albeit strongly supporting the institution itself. Having thoroughly investigated the historical context, Sokol is able to show precisely how Bentham's views agreed with or differed from the then existing law and practice of marriage and from the views of other writers on the subject. The egalitarianism implied by Bentham's conception of the principle of utility, and in particular his recognition that sexual pleasure was an important source of happiness for both men and women, informed his attitude toward marriage. Just as Blamires (2008) complains about the distorting influence of Dumont's Traités de législation (Bentham 1802) in relation to the reception of Bentham's ideas in general and just as Engelmann & Pitts (2011) show how Dumont added to or omitted parts of Bentham's own text, Sokol shows how, in Traités de législation, which has thus far been the main source of our knowledge of Bentham's views on marriage, Dumont either did not employ or perhaps deliberately suppressed many of Bentham's manuscripts on the subject. Sokol has based her account on as yet unpublished manuscripts written mainly in the 1780s and 1790s, but also in the late 1820s, in order to try to recover the authentic Bentham.

As already noted, much of Bentham's early career was dominated by his attempt to draw up a penal code, and it was as part of that code that Bentham wrote on the law of marriage. His task, however, as with his writings on codification in general, was not to consolidate the existing law, but rather to devise the law anew based on the foundation of the principle of utility. According to Sokol (2011, p. 22), Bentham always accepted that “the benefit for society of maintaining monogamous marriage far outweighed any pain caused by social restraint,” on the grounds that promiscuity was likely to engender jealousy, conflict, and child neglect. Hence, he was prepared to subject incestuous marriages, polyandry, and polygamy to punishment. Having said that, he rejected the religious basis for marriage, regarding it instead as a secular contract, which should be entered into for a fixed term, with the free consent of the parties, and which would not therefore be solemnized in church or regulated by church courts. Bentham noted at one point, “Prostitutes and loose women are wives for short terms…freely performed and but once the act stamps infamy: Perforce and habitually it confers honor” (quoted in Sokol 2011, p. 27). Bentham's view that the main difference between a wife and a prostitute was the length of the contract was not meant to diminish the status of the wife, but rather to raise that of the prostitute. Although Bentham assigned authority to the husband over the wife on the grounds that it was necessary for peace and concord within the family that there be a dominant partner, his proposals would have improved significantly the position of the wife when compared with the common law doctrine of coverture, under which her legal personality was subsumed within that of her husband. The wife would be able to enter contracts, hold real and personal property, and sue and be sued, and she would have access to the courts should she have reason to complain about her husband's behavior. Bentham considered a whole range of further matters relating to marriage, including divorce, adultery, desertion, and wife beating. The law of marriage shows Bentham, in typical fashion, attempting to work through the implications of the principle of utility for the detailed practical working of a social institution, rather than being content merely to lay down a few general principles.

Although Bentham did not relinquish his support for marriage as an appropriate context both for the enjoyment of sex and for the raising of children, he did, nevertheless, advocate sexual freedom and thought that nonprolific sexual relationships of whatever kind, and in whatever context, providing that they were consensual, should be neither penalized by law nor condemned by public opinion, both because they would help to avert the threat to subsistence caused by population growth and because sexual pleasure was the most intense and the most pure form of pleasure. The theme of Bentham's contribution to sexual liberty has been explored by Dabhoiwala (2010) in his account of the emergence in England of an intellectual case for sexual freedom between 1660 and 1800. For centuries, sex outside marriage, or fornication, had been illegal, and individuals had been subjected to punishment for practicing it. From the later seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century, the balance began to shift toward sexual freedom, so that the view that “sexual activity outside marriage should be regarded as a private matter, not subject to public regulation or punishment” came to be articulated in a manner that was increasingly “sophisticated, public, and influential” (Dabhoiwala 2010, p. 92). Dabhoiwala draws attention to Bentham's significance as an advocate of sexual freedom and comments that it is “remarkable how little notice” Bentham's work has received and how scholars have failed to relate it to the wider intellectual currents of the age (p. 168). Hence, Bentham assumes a central place in a narrative concerning the increasing demand for sexual freedom in relation to heterosexual activity. Bentham's attitude toward sexuality was entirely consistent with, and indeed required by, his psychological and ethical hedonism. Relevant here is Rosen (2003), whose exploration of the connection of the classical utilitarians Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill with earlier major thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who themselves emphasized the importance of utility in their thought but who have not generally been recognized as utilitarians, emphasizes their common Epicurean heritage.

This brings us back to the Collected Works, as the next volume scheduled for publication will deal with Bentham's writings on sexual morality dating from the mid-1810s (Bentham 2014). This volume presents in authoritative form the material that appeared under the title “Sex” in Selected Writings (Bentham 2011b), which is given its proper title “Sextus” (referring to sexual feelings as the sixth sense) and includes, together with other material, a further substantial essay entitled “Of Sexual Irregularities.” Bentham argued that attitudes toward sexual morality in Britain had been based primarily on the Mosaic law and the teachings of St. Paul, both of which condoned asceticism. More particularly, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah provided the Biblical basis for the view that God had issued an absolute prohibition against homosexuality, which was known as “the crime against nature.” According to the Christian Church, sexual activity was sinful unless it involved one male and one female, within marriage, for the procreation of children. Bentham offered classical Rome and Greece, where certain male same-sex relationships were regarded as normal, as alternative models of sexual morality. All that the term natural meant in this context was approved by opinion—no one sort of sexual activity was in any absolute sense more natural or normal than any other. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah did not condemn homosexuality, in Bentham's view, but gang rape. The key question was whether there was consent. No one, assumed Bentham, would willingly consent to engage in a particular sexual practice—whether with a person of their own or the opposite sex, with more than one person, with an animal, with an inanimate object, with various parts of the body—unless they expected it to be pleasurable. Bentham argued that the Biblical record was rather more ambivalent than Christian apologists were prepared to recognize: The relationship between Jonathan and David in the Old Testament was clearly portrayed as homosexual, and there was evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was a practicing homosexual. Bentham's argument was, in essence, that because sexual gratification constituted the most intense of pleasures, there were no utilitarian grounds for condemning consensual sexual activity. Bentham was, as noted above, persuaded by Malthus's [1992 (1798)] argument that population growth tended to outstrip food supply. This was a reason for encouraging nonprocreative sexual activity, as it would help to reduce population growth. Bentham was also an advocate of birth control measures, although this is a part of his activities that remains obscure (Schofield 2011a). Bentham put forward provocative views on prostitution, infanticide, euthanasia, and sexual relationships between teachers and pupils, but further discussion must await the publication of the volume.

CONCLUSION

Many scholars may well have to reassess their view of Bentham when the volume on sexual morality appears. Indeed, such reassessments have generally taken place as each new volume appears in the Collected Works. To engage in Bentham studies at the moment is to walk on shifting sands. Research findings are necessarily provisional, as they are in danger of being superseded by the next volume to appear in the edition. Nevertheless, Bentham studies have progressed enormously in the past thirty years, and they have gone well beyond the rather sterile view that Bentham was some sort of authoritarian, who saw it as the role of the legislator to govern the behavior of those subject to him through the allocation of rewards and punishments, in order to create a utopia inhabited by beings who had been forced into some sort of happiness mold. The revisionist studies of the 1980s and 1990s, mainly within legal and political theory, placed Bentham back firmly within the liberal tradition, while at the same time emphasizing Bentham's foundational contribution to that tradition. Recent Bentham studies have become much more diverse in their subject matters and located in a wider variety of disciplines and approaches. There are still very few Bentham specialists as such, but there is a much more widespread interest in Bentham from scholars who have recognized the importance or relevance of his thought to their particular fields. In many respects, we have only just begun to explore Bentham's legacy.

disclosure statement

The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

acknowledgments The author is grateful to Hazel Wilkinson and Tom Ue for assistance in compiling the references and to Tim Causer for providing the description of Transcribe Bentham.

More AR articles citing this reference

RELATED RESOURCES

De Champs E. 2008. La déontologie politique: Ou la pensée constitutionnelle de Jeremy Bentham. Geneva: Librairie Droz. 387 pp.

De Champs E, Cléro J-P. 2009. Bentham et la France: Fortune et infortunes de l'utilitarisme. Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation. 311 pp.

Quinn M. 2011. The invention of facts: Bentham's ethics and the education of public taste. Revue d'études benthamiennes 9

Quinn M. 2008. A failure to reconcile the irreconcilable? Security, subsistence and equality in Bentham's writings on the civil code and on the poor laws. Hist. Polit. Thought 39(2):320–43

Tusseau G. 2011. Jeremy Bentham: La guerre des mots. Paris: Dalloz. 185 pp.

Wallace V. 2012. Benthamite radicalism and its Scots Presbyterian contexts. Utilitas 24(1):1–25

Website for The Bentham Newsletter, University College London: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journals/bentham_newsletter

Website for The Bentham Project, University College London: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project

Website for Centre Bentham: http://www.centrebentham.fr/

Website for Revue d'études benthamiennes: http://etudes-benthamiennes.revues.org/