CHAPTER TWO

Jeremy Bentham’s Dream

Shall I seek excuses for introducing these autobiographical sketches? I think not. They are faithful as pictures; they are interesting as philosophical studies.

—BENTHAM, QUOTED IN BOWRING,
MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE

Reading Bentham

Jeremy Bentham usually goes down in history as the great founding father of nontheological utilitarianism, and his claim to the title is impressive, though no better than Godwin’s. Yet in many ways, Bentham’s reputation is an artifact crafted by later generations of utilitarians, particularly John Stuart Mill, the son of Bentham’s leading disciple, James Mill. Mill the younger, whose upbringing was in large part guided by Bentham, designated his own spirits of the age:

The writers of whom we speak have never been read by the multitude; except for the more slight of their works, their readers have been few: but they have been the teachers of the teachers; there is hardly to be found in England an individual of any importance in the world of mind, who (whatever opinions he may have afterwards adopted) did not first learn to think from one of these two; and though their influences have but begun to diffuse themselves through these intermediate channels over society at large, there is already scarcely a publication of any consequence addressed to the educated classes, which, if these persons had not existed, would not have been different from what it is. These men are, Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—the two great seminal minds of England in their age.1

But these two great seminal minds were, on Mill’s reckoning, locked in a great seminal conflict, with the Romantic Coleridgean heart pitted against the calculating Benthamite brain. Mill damned Bentham even as he praised him:

Bentham’s contempt, then, of all other schools of thinkers; his determination to create a philosophy wholly out of the materials furnished by his own mind, and by minds like his own; was his first disqualification as a philosopher. His second, was the incompleteness of his own mind as a representative of universal human nature. In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination.2

This was a charge that would stick—Bentham was no philosopher, and he was the great anti-Romantic, lacking in the most crucial ingredient of the Romantic outlook, imagination. And human sympathy, self-consciousness, and much else besides. “Self-consciousness, the daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to which this age owes so much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know.”³ Worse, he was a kind of man-child, more of an exotic plant than Godwin before Wollstonecraft. He had an “under-nourished conception of human nature,” as a recent edition of Dickens’s Hard Times has it.⁴ He, and/or his devoted disciple Mill senior (whom he first befriended in 1808), supposedly provided the source material for the fact-obsessed Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’s novel, who had no room for poetry or fancy or fun in the educational process. Although the famous opening words from An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation had it that “[n]ature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” and it is for them alone to “point out what we ought to do, as well to determine what we shall do,” the principle of utility in Benthamite practice seemed to afford little pleasure and much pain.⁵

One of the kindest and most perceptive reconstructions of this take on Bentham is beautifully worded by Martha Nussbaum:

… the childlike nature of Bentham’s approach to life, which Mill often stresses, proves valuable: for Bentham understood how powerful pain and pleasure are for children and the child in us. Bentham did not value the emotional elements of the personality in the right way. He simplified them too, lacking all understanding of poetry (as Mill insists) and of love (as we might add). But perhaps it was the very childlike character of Bentham, the man who loved the pleasures of small creatures, who allowed the mice in his study to sit on his lap, that made him able to see something Aristotle did not see, the need that we all have to be held and comforted, the need to escape a terrible loneliness and deadness.6

In other words, at least for Nussbaum, Mill was both right and wrong—something was missing in Bentham, but there was also something there that Mill did not quite get, something that perhaps no one has quite gotten.

This chapter will try, in a rather zigzag fashion, to capture a bit more of the essential Bentham on this score, of Bentham as one of the most curiously sensitive creatures ever to set pen to paper. He belongs more in the company of Godwin than one would ever guess from his minutely detailed blueprints for institutional reform, his endless “codifications.”⁷ Surprisingly, like Godwin and despite Mill, he cannot really be disentangled from the Romantic movement, despite his infamous remark about the children’s game of pushpin being as good as poetry.⁸ Bentham, more than any other figure discussed in this book, needs to be made a renewed source of wonder.

Given Mill’s indictment, coming from the very man who was raised to be Bentham’s true heir, it is perhaps not odd that Bentham still awaits a full first-rate biography.⁹ He is often introduced, and sketched, but an up-to-date, truly satisfying, richly-colored portrait of him is not to be had, despite an extremely impressive Bentham Project at University College, London, lovingly devoted to producing excellent scholarly editions of all his works and, in a very innovative program, engaging the public in a great mass effort to transcribe his many as yet untranscribed writings. The work of the Bentham Project is exemplary and provides the best available means for initially framing the life and work of Bentham, which, given the many unknowns, must be approached in a spirit of humility and uncertainty. The Project summarizes and illustrates his life as follows:

The philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was born in Spitalfields, London, on 15 February 1748. He proved to be something of a child prodigy: while still a toddler he was discovered sitting at his father’s desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three. At twelve, he was sent to Queen’s College Oxford, his father, a prosperous attorney, having decided that Jeremy would follow him into the law, and feeling quite sure that his brilliant son would one day be Lord Chancellor of England.

Bentham, however, soon became disillusioned with the law, especially after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of the day, Sir William Blackstone (1723–80). Instead of practising the law, he decided to write about it, and he spent his life criticising the existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. His father’s death in 1792 left him financially independent, and for nearly forty years he lived quietly in Westminster, producing between ten and twenty sheets of manuscript a day, even when he was in his eighties.

Even for those who have never read a line of Bentham, he will always be associated with the doctrine of Utilitarianism and the principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. This, however, was only his starting point for a radical critique of society, which aimed to test the usefulness of existing institutions, practices and beliefs against an objective evaluative standard. He was an outspoken advocate of law reform, a pugnacious critic of established political doctrines like natural law and contractarianism, and the first to produce a utilitarian justification for democracy. He also had much to say of note on subjects as diverse as prison reform, religion, poor relief, international law, and animal welfare. A visionary far ahead of his time, he advocated universal suffrage and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

By the 1820s Bentham had become a widely respected figure, both in Britain and in other parts of the world. His ideas were greatly to influence the reforms of public administration made during the nineteenth century, and his writings are still at the centre of academic debate, especially as regards social policy, legal positivism, and welfare economics. Research into his work continues at UCL in the Bentham Project, set up in the early 1960s with the aim of producing the first scholarly edition of his works and correspondence, a projected total of some seventy volumes!10

What follows here is not so much a challenge to this summary account as an effort to flesh out and cast in a somewhat warmer light the “visionary” Bentham that the Project is doing so much to bring to public awareness. Bentham the visionary can be very hard to discern in his own best-known writings; more of the work, and more of the life, might help.

Perhaps it is the sheer mass of Bentham’s writings—some twenty million surviving words—that has frightened away would-be biographers, and the fact that so many of those words have remained unpublished for so long, accessible only to those willing to try to decipher his often nearly illegible scrawl. Daunting, too, is the fact that as these writings have come more and more into the light, it has become all the clearer that on many counts Bentham was even more extraordinary and visionary than his admirers and critics had supposed. In fuller and more informed retrospect, the circle around Bentham, including such incisive intellects as James Mill and George Grote, tends to fade. The greatest of the “Philosophical Radicals,” as the politically charged Benthamites were called, appears to have ended up far in advance even of his own disciples, especially on such topics as sexual morality, race, democracy, and imperialism. It is only in recent years that Bentham has been appreciated for his attacks on the spread of empire and colonization, and for his extraordinarily enlightened views on same-sex love. Who knew, circa 1950, that Bentham, the object of such stinging abuse from Dickens and Marx, would emerge as a hero of gay studies? Of postcolonial studies? Of the feminist movement? Of animal liberation?11 Mill senior contrived to defend democracy on utilitarian grounds but without extending the vote to women, a critical failure that Bentham himself condemned, and both Mills built careers with the East India Company and condoned aspects of the British Empire that Bentham deemed preposterous. As Peter Cain has cogently argued, Bentham’s recently published “Spanish writings” on colonies, “especially those that give a close analysis of the benefits that elites received from colonialism, represent the most acute and innovatory aspects of his thought in this field. When they are added to his better-known economic analyses of colonialism written between the 1780s and early 1800s, and set against the broad currents of liberal and radical questioning of the causes and consequences of empire across two centuries, it would be no exaggeration to say that Bentham made one of the greatest contributions to anti-colonial literature anywhere in the Western world, and one which in some ways was never improved upon in Britain.”¹²

Moreover, once one shakes free of Mill’s reading of him, Bentham no longer seems happily cast as simply the hermit-like leading light of utilitarianism, the less politically involved theorist who let his activist friends and associates—Mill, Samuel Romilly, Francis Place (who also advised him financially, as he had Godwin), Southwood Smith—do the politicking on behalf of utilitarianism. He was far more engaged politically and socially than the image of him as a type of Mycroft Holmes, the brain behind the scenes, would have it. And his political engagements were indeed visionary, however troubling that vision sometimes was. Thus, both philosophically and practically, the standard accounts of the growth of utilitarianism can, in greater historical perspective, seem too Millian in their slant. Consider Graham Wallas’s statement, in his The Life of Francis Place, 1771–1854:

In the Utilitarian movement there are two distinct periods divided roughly by the year 1824. Up to that time Bentham had been the active leader of the group; and although Mill and Place were the only two members of the school who were in constant personal intimacy with Bentham himself, Dumont, Brougham, Grote (after 1818), and others would have accepted the name Benthamite. Apart from their writing and thinking, James Mill and Bentham were constantly occupied with practical projects. They used the ordinary methods of committees, subscriptions, and newspaper articles for the direct improvement of schools, and law courts, and political machinery.

In 1823 James Mill’s greater son, John Stuart Mill, then seventeen years old, entered the India Office, and began his independent intellectual life. In the spring of 1824 the Westminster Review was founded. From 1824 John Stuart Mill, with the younger generation of Utilitarians—Charles Austin, Eyton Tooke, G. J. Graham, and others—formed the real center of the movement. They wrote books and reviews rather than newspaper articles, and were more really interested in speculative questions than in practical politics or social work.13

Although there is some truth to this account, it does not convey all that was lost or left behind in the transition, even though it is embedded in a biography that shows how Place and others in the earlier circle were often pained with the direction taken by the younger Mill, who was charged with becoming “a German metaphysical mystic.”¹⁴

It is of course true that Bentham was first and foremost concerned with, as Ross Harrison has put it, “political or legal reform. His thought, that is, was centrally concerned with the organization of social, or public, institutions; firstly more specifically with the organization and content of the law; latterly with developing a blueprint for a complete administrative state.” He did, in the course of this, develop “several more limited plans for the organization of social institutions, for workhouses for the poor, for schools, and above all for the ‘mill for grinding rogues honest’ … the panopticon prison.”¹⁵ His work on “private ethics” and many other topics was less of a priority, more of an afterthought or diversion from his main work. But there were many such diversions and they were lengthy. Somehow, Mill did not get that quite right either. Nor did he capture the degree to which there was an extraordinary method to the seeming madness.

Still, it is going too far to claim that the term “classical utilitarianism” is anachronistic or proleptic when applied to Bentham. If his priorities differed from those of, say, Peter Singer, they also differed from those of Godwin, Mill, and Sidgwick, each of whom worked the term “utilitarianism” for his own purposes.¹⁶ And if it is true that Bentham’s phases can be, as Stephen Engelmann claims, characterized as “penal law and general jurisprudence early on … civil law, political economy, and what we would call public policy in the middle phase … and ontology, religion, political reform, and constitutional law late in life,” it is also true that, with respect to Bentham’s felicific calculus, often enough “it remains unclear what this expansive critical and impartial calculus means for him. It does mean … that his were some of the earliest writings calling for female suffrage, and that well before Marx and Darwin he broke with nationalism and humanism in his vision of a continuum of sensitive beings. It also means, however, that in one text … we can find condemnation of masturbation, toleration of bestiality, and approval of infanticide as a means of women’s self-defense.” In his case for “all-comprehensive liberty in consensual sex,” Bentham allows “the superiority of same-sex over regular modes (because they do not lead to pregnancy), sex among children as a virtuous substitute of masturbation (which is too available and enervating), and the absurdity of laws against infanticide (which sacrifice the genuine happiness of the aware to the only imputed feelings of the unaware). … Sex for Bentham is democratic, even anarchic: ‘These are precisely the only pleasures of sense which are as fully and effectually within the reach of the most indigent … as within the most affluent classes of mankind: they are equally within the reach of the subject many as of the ruling few.’”17 However, as will later be shown in detail, Bentham’s hedonistic interpretation of happiness, which aligned with his “logic of the will” rather than an Aristotelian “logic of the understanding,” had it that “happiness was never fixed, but was changing and developing as societies changed and developed.”¹⁸

Engelmann urges that rather “than react to Bentham’s conclusions with approval or disapproval, it might serve us better to know more of his thought. Bentham simply didn’t share some fundamental and familiar assumptions about freedom, intervention, and the special dignity of the human subject.” He holds that Bentham is primarily useful because we can use his “sometimes troubling consistencies to reflect on what is missing, latent, contradictory, or disturbing in contemporary theory and practice.” That is no doubt true, but if left at that, it is also evasive, especially since, as Engelmann himself stresses in a pair of rhetorical questions: “Aren’t there many researchers in our universities who tell us that fairness is irrational, or that all goods are commensurable, or that a comprehensive science of human/animal behavior is not only possible but has arrived? And haven’t many of us today come to equate freedom with extensive choice under conditions of mutual surveillance, and don’t we often look to experts for the latest strategies of pleasure seeking and self-management, while other experts—sometimes the same ones—assure us that there is really no self to manage?”¹⁹ Given such supposedly Benthamite tendencies, perhaps one should acknowledge that enhanced critical awareness of Bentham’s “troubling consistencies” might just as well point many of “us” back to his path rather than in a different direction. Avowed Benthamism seems much less anachronistic or proleptic than avowed Aristotelianism, Thomism, virtue ethics, natural law, etc. etc., for better or worse. But avowed Benthamism today can also take some more radical and oppositional turns.

This, to be sure, is not to deny that understanding Bentham in historical context is important and calls for great care. For example, Bentham disliked the word “liberty,” which was used in contradictory ways to mean both doing what one pleased without interference and the civil or political liberty created by government. When referring to the latter, he preferred Montesquieu’s word “security,” which, along with equality, abundance, and subsistence provided “the main aim of legislation concerned with the distribution of property and other entitlements in society.” The concern with security, and legitimate expectations, reveals something fundamental about Bentham’s perspective on humanity:

In order to form a clear idea of the whole extent which ought to be given to the principle of security, it is necessary to consider, that man is not like the brutes, limited to the present time, either in enjoyment or suffering, but that he is susceptible of pleasure and pain by anticipation, and that it is not enough to guard him against an actual loss, but also to guarantee to him, as much as possible, his possessions against further losses. The idea of his security must be prolonged to him throughout the whole view that his imagination can measure.

This disposition to look forward, which has so marked an influence upon the condition of man, may be called expectation—expectation of the future. It is by means of this we are enabled to form a general plan of conduct; it is by means of this, that the successive moments which compose the duration of life are not like insulated and independent points, but become parts of a continuous whole. Expectation is a chain which unites our present and our future existence, and passes beyond ourselves to the generations which follow us. The sensibility of the individual is prolonged through all the links of this chain.20

As Rosen notes of this passage, as “with Hume, the maintenance of secure possession of one’s life and property was considered the main task of governments, and Bentham was led through the emphasis on security to embrace in part an indirect form of utilitarianism.” This interpretation, which owes much to the work of P. J. Kelly, “rejects the view that Bentham was a simple act-utilitarian intent upon the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain without regard to its distribution or other factors which might affect such a distribution.” And other works, such as Official Aptitude Maximized, Expense Minimized, also made it clear that the application of the principle of utility would largely involve applying such subprinciples as, in the case of constitutional law, hiring and keeping highly competent public officials. But the Introduction is itself misleading on this score, being incomplete in many ways and largely concerned with punishment, and as “a result, the numerous interpretations of Bentham’s utilitarianism and conceptions of ‘classical’ utilitarianism which are mainly based on the early chapters of IPML present an erroneous view of how Bentham conceived the operation of the principle of utility.”²¹ Many of the controversies over act v. rule utilitarianism really are anachronistic, reflecting various rather artificial debates generated in the twentieth century. As Rosen has stressed, in classical utilitarianism “no such contrast is emphasized and utility may be applied to acts, rules, conventions, laws, customs, etc. without discrimination.”²² Indeed, the classical utilitarian standard could be used to judge between these very alternatives simply by calculating the happiness maximizing potential of adopting an act or a rule or a global approach, etc., and the hope was always that this standard would provide a more determinate and objective way of determining what should be done.

But just what Bentham thought should be done remains a source of utter astonishment.

Bentham’s Afterlife

To capture something more of the essence of Bentham, who so often goes down as the greatest of the great utilitarians, it might be best to open at the close, with the revealing end of the man whose life had a much steadier upward trajectory than Godwin’s. As Engelmann himself makes clear, the later Bentham was in so many ways the better Bentham:

By 1818 it was clear to Bentham that utility required expansion of the suffrage, representation by population through annual elections, disestablishment of the Church, and the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy—and that fundamental constitutional change was a necessary precondition for political reform. At the same time he was involved in political agitation Bentham was writing new notes into the final year of his life for the introduction to a ‘pannomion,’ or comprehensive legal code, that might effectively replace existing legal structures. … He died at the age of eighty-four on June 6, 1832, one day before the great Reform Act became law: a crucial, if partial, step toward the representative democracy for which he fought in the last years of his life.23

And as Schofield adds, by “his death in 1832, he was a republican, admiring the government of the United States of America above all others in existence.”²⁴

Engelmann and Schofield have gone far to show the consistency in Bentham’s views, despite his shifting priorities. The biggest change occurred in the early 1810s, when he became convinced that the ills of society were not historical accidents but the result of a conspiracy of sinister interests, the work of the “ruling few.” It was this change in his assessment of the historical facts that drove home to Bentham “that utility required expansion of the suffrage, representation by population through annual elections, disestablishment of the Church, and the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy—and that fundamental constitutional change was a necessary precondition for political reform.”²⁵

All the more extraordinary, then, that one of his last great efforts would involve an exceedingly weird project for stuffing and displaying the bodies of the deceased great (and others), who could continue to inspire humanity in death as they did in life. Bentham himself would lead the way.

Thus, following his peaceful death from old age, his head, according to one account, resting on the bosom of the editor of his collected works, John Bowring, Bentham, in accordance with his Will, had his body donated to medical science for purposes of dissection, but with the stipulation that his medical friend, follower, and sometimes editor, the Unitarian minister Southwood Smith

will take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures to the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame in the manner expressed in the paper annexed to this my will and at the top of which I have written “Auto Icon” The skeleton he will cause to be put together in such manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing I direct that the body thus prepared shall be transferred to my executor [Bowring] He will cause the skeleton to be clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me The Body so clothed together with the Chair and the Staff in my later years borne by me he will take charge of And for containing the whole apparatus he will cause to be prepared an appropriate box or case and will cause to be engraved in conspicuous characters on a plate to be affixed thereon and also on the labels on the glass cases in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained.26

As James Crimmins notes, the “choice of a black suit for the auto-icon points to a change in taste from 1824, when Bentham expressly forbade black as well as grey!” Moreover, the following additional instructions “annexed to the will under the heading ‘Auto-Icon’ dated 13 April 1830, were written by Southwood Smith at Bentham’s behest and witnessed by Bentham’s signature.”

The manner in which Mr. Benthams body is to be disposed of after his death The Head is to be prepared according to the specimen which Mr Bentham has seen and approved of The Body is to be used as the means of illustrating a series of lectures to which scientific & literary men are to be invited These lectures are to expound the situation structure & functions of the different organs the arrangement & distribution of the vessels & whatever may illustrate the mechanism by which the actions of the animal economy are performed the object of these lectures being twofold first to communicate curious interesting & highly important knowledge & secondly to show that the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance & is kept up by misconception & that the human body when dissected instead of being an object of disgust is as much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful After such lectures have been given those organs which are capable of being preserved for example the heart the kidney &c &c to be prepared in whatever manner may be conceived to render their preservation the most perfect & durable And finally when all the soft parts have been disposed of the bones are to be formed into a skeleton which after the head prepared in the manner already stated has been attached to it is to be dressed in the clothes usually worn by Mr Bentham & in this manner to be perpetually preserved—April 13 1830.²⁷

Bentham’s instructions were followed as closely as possible, his head being preserved in the manner of the New Zealand Maori, and on a stormy and spooky night a few days after Bentham’s death, Southwood Smith delivered a moving eulogy to an audience of friends, followers, and medical students at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine, in a small circular operating theater with the body of Bentham laid out before him, clothed in a nightshirt. Smith’s oration was perhaps the first attempt to do Bentham biographical justice, and the main event that evening was in fact not the dissection itself, but the final rites for which Bentham had hoped, sending a strong and graphic message to humanity to get over the religious superstition and ignorant revulsion that was making the advance of medical science so difficult. Dissection of a body was at the time regarded as a horrific additional disincentive to the crime of murder, making capital punishment in that case all the more fearsome. Shortly after Bentham’s example, and perhaps in part because of it, medical dissection was at last divorced from capital punishment and made a legal option for wills.

Bentham’s body was indeed soon the object of the appropriate medical research, except for the bits used to create the Auto-Icon, which has been the greatest single conversation piece of utilitarianism ever since. What was Bentham doing? Even the Bentham Project seems hard pressed to keep a straight face when recounting this particular Benthamite project:

At the end of the South Cloisters of the main building of UCL stands a wooden cabinet, which has been a source of curiosity and perplexity to visitors.

The cabinet contains Bentham’s preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, and surmounted by a wax head. … Not surprisingly, this peculiar relic has given rise to numerous legends and anecdotes. One of the most commonly recounted is that the Auto-Icon regularly attends meetings of the College Council, and that it is solemnly wheeled into the Council Room to take its place among the present-day members. Its presence, it is claimed, is always recorded in the minutes with the words Jeremy Bentham—present but not voting. Another version of the story asserts that the Auto-Icon does vote, but only on occasions when the votes of the other Council members are equally split. In these cases the Auto-Icon invariably votes for the motion.

Bentham had originally intended that his head should be part of the Auto-Icon, and for ten years before his death (so runs another story) carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to adorn it. Unfortunately when the time came to preserve it for posterity, the process went disastrously wrong, robbing the head of most of its facial expression, and leaving it decidedly unattractive. The wax head was therefore substituted, and for some years the real head, with its glass eyes, reposed on the floor of the Auto-Icon, between Bentham’s legs. However, it proved an irresistible target for students, especially from King’s College London, who stole the head in 1975 and demanded a ransome of £100 to be paid to the charity Shelter. UCL finally agreed to pay a ransome of £10 and the head was returned. On another occasion, according to legend, the head, again stolen by students, was eventually found in a luggage locker at a Scottish Station (possibly Aberdeen). The last straw (so runs yet another story) came when it was discovered in the front quadrangle being used for football practice, and the head was henceforth placed in secure storage.

Thus, Bentham, with his famous walking stick “Dapple,” remains on display to this day, excepting the badly deteriorated head.28

Why? Medical dissection is one thing, mummification and public display another, and the purpose of the second of these has been much debated, with some thinking that Bentham was playing a joke on humanity, or was perhaps even being co-opted, in death, for purposes of discrediting utilitarianism. His apparent explanation of his thinking on this score, “Auto-Icon: Or, Farther Uses of the Dead for the Living,” has been attacked as inauthentic, tongue in check, and many other things besides. It was, apparently, a further gloss on Southwood Smith’s “Uses of the Dead to the Living,” which had defended medical dissection in that organ of utilitarianism founded by Bentham and his circle, The Westminster Review. But it was less concerned with dissection and more concerned with iconization, the creation of such relics as the Auto-Icon.

Crimmins makes a very compelling case for both the authenticity and seriousness of Bentham’s writings on this subject, observing:

Many people have speculated as to exactly why Bentham chose to have his body preserved in this way, with explanations ranging from a practical joke at the expense of posterity to a sense of overweening self-importance. Perhaps the Auto-Icon may be more plausibly regarded as an attempt to question religious sensibilities about life and death. Yet whatever Bentham’s true motives, the Auto-Icon will always be a source of fascination and debate, and will serve as a perpetual reminder of the man whose ideals inspired the institution in which it stands.

Being an atheist and a rigorous utilitarian, Bentham was almost bound at some point in his life to confront the question, ‘Of what use can the dead be to the living?’ That this question should foster an expansive thesis about the usefulness to be derived from corpses, particularly the remains of those of achievement and intellect, is also typical of Bentham. He had always considered it a part of his utilitarian mission to be a projector of useful proposals, and throughout his life he gave practical effect to his inventive genius in a wide range of areas. In this respect he was truly the great polymath of the age. He slept in a sleeping bag of his own design, mapped out projects for portable houses, a new kind of harpsichord and improvements to the printing of music, and drew up proposals for a school of legislation and a canal in Central America (to connect the Atlantic and Pacific). He devoted numerous frustrating years to the notorious Panopticon prison plan, introduced improvements to political institutions and constitutions, codes of judicial procedure and civil and penal law (each designed to eliminate delay, expense, complexity, obscurity, and uncertainty, and to enhance the greatest happiness), and offered a bewildering stream of new law proposals on subjects as diverse as inheritance, homosexuality, cruelty to animals, paupers, policing, real property, taxes on law proceedings, and sinecures in church and state. Other Benthamic inventions included numerous statistical manuals, digests, hand-books, and charts which facilitated a scientific approach to health administration. The ‘conversation tubes’ were a kind of primitive telephone Bentham installed at his London residence in Queen’s Square Place and imagined being used in his Panopticon prisons to connect the cells with the central watchtower. Rather more practical were the plans he drafted for a flash pump, ‘frigidarium’, central hot-air heating system, and document lift—versions of which are all in use today. Bentham’s plan for a forgery-proof currency, like so many other schemes, did not fair so well; the Directors of the Bank of England refused to be troubled on the matter, and the manuscripts remained unpublished until the 1950s. Among his enduring legacies are the terms he coined to express and give currency to new ideas, such as ‘utilitarian’, ‘international’, and ‘codification’, and the Oxford English Dictionary bears ample witness to many others.

To be innovative when pondering the utility of his own death, then, was not such a departure for Bentham; but that he should have been thinking along such lines even as a young adult is truly remarkable. His decision to leave his body for medical research, he later recalled, was ‘no hasty—no recent determination’ but was decided in 1769 on the occasion of his coming of age.29

Crimmins is surely right in thinking that Bentham was serious about these efforts, even if they did not have quite the effect anticipated. As previously remarked, Bertrand Russell recalled hearing as a child a humorous jibe to the effect that Bentham recommended making soup of one’s dead grandmothers, and there can be little doubt that the wit hit home because of the Auto-Icon project. But, as later sections will show, Bentham’s actions here fit quite well with his late-life attacks on religion, especially “Church of Englandism,” and they are besides not much weirder than Godwin’s notions about the treatment of the dead.³⁰ As the Bowring memoirs record, Bentham took strong objection to the old nostrum that one should never speak ill of the dead:

This maxim is one of the inventions of despotism: it perpetuates misrepresentation of the ruling few at the expense of the subject many; it employs suppression instead of open lying, for the purpose of deception; it would shield depredation and oppression from exposure; and when it is too late to prevent misdoings by present punishment, would protect the misdoers even against future denunciation and judgment. Aristocracy gets all the benefit of the maxim; for the poor are never honoured with unqualified posthumous praise. And thus the world bestows its foolish confidence on those who always betray it.31

What could be more effective than Auto-Iconism at shaking up the established but pernicious practices with respect to the dead? Was that not Bentham’s very business, shaking things up, in the most creative ways imaginable?

Crimmins is obviously also right about Bentham’s astounding creativity and inventiveness, across an astonishing range of subjects, not simply those having to do with law and legislation. However ironic it may be, he was one of the most imaginative persons who ever lived. Bentham could not touch anything without trying to improve it, and he was perhaps especially odd in being at once both the most imaginative and the most wonkish political and legal philosopher who ever lived, ever ready to go off into a mass of technical details, whether the subject was the penal code or the mummification of great thinkers. And this was apparently his nature at least from the time of his conversion experience, in 1768–69, shortly before he was admitted to the bar, when the principle of utility first struck him as the answer to everything. To understand his seeming eccentricities, one must appreciate how deep his conversion and commitment to this principle really were. With a noted flare, and speaking in the third person, Bentham himself tells the story in the long version of his “Article on Utilitarianism”:

Between the years 1762 and 1769 came out a pamphlet of Dr. Priestly’s, written as usual with him currente calamo and without any precise method predetermined, but containing at the close of it, it is believed in the very last page, in so many words the phrase ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and this was stated in the character of a principle constituting not only a rational foundation, but the only rational foundation, of all enactments in legislation and all rules and precepts destined for the direction of human conduct in private life.

Somehow or other shortly after its publication a copy of this pamphlet found its way into the little circulating library belonging to a little coffee-house called Harper’s Coffee-house, attached as it were to Queen’s College Oxford, and deriving from the population of the College the whole of its subsistence. It was a corner house having one front towards the High Street, another towards a narrow lane which on that side skirts Queen’s College and loses itself in a lane issuing from one of the gates of New College. To this library the subscription was a shilling a quarter, or in the University phrase a shilling a term. Of this subscription the produce was composed to two or three newspapers, with magazines one or two, and now and then a newly published pamphlet. … The year 1768 was the latest of the years in which Mr. Bentham ever made at Oxford a residence of more than a day or two. The occasion of that visit was the giving his vote in his quality of Master of Arts for the University of Oxford on the occasion of a Parliamentary election. … This year, 1768 was the latest of all the years on which this pamphlet could have come into his hands.

Be this as it may, it was by that pamphlet and this phrase in it that his principles on the subject of morality, public and private together, were determined. It was from that pamphlet and that page of it that he drew that phrase, the words and import of which have by his writings been so widely diffused over the civilized world. At sight of it he cried out as it were in an inward ecstasy like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principle of Hydrostatics, Eureka.32

As the “Shorter Version” of the article also makes clear, the importance of Priestly’s formulation of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” was in “substituting to the equivocal word ‘utility’ the unequivocal phrase of which happiness is the principal and sole characteristic ingredient.”³³ Bentham is clear enough that he was influenced by a great many sources, from the ancients’ invocation of utility (e.g., in Horace’s Satires) to the more recent works of Hume, Hutcheson, Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Helvétius, and Beccaria, all of which had a keen influence on him. But he was also prescient about how misleading the term “utility” could be: “by which approbation was called for by every opinion or operation by which a contribution was made to this or that end, whatsoever might be the nature of that end: instead of its being regarded as the principle by which approbation is called for, for such measures alone as are contributory to human happiness taken in the aggregate, to the maximum of the happiness enjoyed by the aggregate composed of the several members of which the community in question is composed.” This was a mistake with very serious implications:

Of this mistake one consequence was that of its being a principle by which disapprobation was called for to the pursuit of pleasure, to every action by means of which pleasure was either at the moment produced, or a probability of seeing it at a true time produced. Whereas in the intention of the originator of it, if such he may be styled, the same sentiment of approbation is called for every action without distinction of which pleasure in any shape, at the moment or any subsequent moment, is produced: such approbation being given on the single condition that by such action, pain or loss of pleasure to a greater amount be not produced. Thus on every occasion happiness is in his view of considering it a subject-matter of account and calculation, of profit and loss, just as money itself is—that precious matter which, but for the happiness which it is contributory to the production of, would be altogether valueless.34

Whether or not Bentham’s recollection got all the details quite right—Priestly’s pamphlet did not have that exact wording, but works by Hutcheson and Beccaria did—this is no doubt how he recalled it all, and the first striking effect of the conversion—“the idea of happiness being in his mind constantly connected with that of utility, and not suspecting that it could fail of being so in any other”—yielded his first, albeit anonymously authored publication, A Fragment on Government (which was actually part of a longer work, A Comment on the Commentaries). The Fragment was an all-out assault on Blackstone, Locke, and the social contractarian view that had had such a powerful influence on English law and politics. Of such doctrine concerning “the original contract” creating political society, Bentham, no more modest than Godwin, recalled that he had “grappled with it and threw it to the ground, from whence it has never since ventured to rear its head—or say from whence no man has since ventured to take it up and give support to it.”³⁵ Or, as he put it in a note written in his own copy of the work: “[T]his was the very first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammels of authority and ancestor-wisdom on the field of law.”³⁶

If Bentham could, at a mere twenty-eight years, overthrow the reigning jurisprudence and political philosophy of his country, is it any wonder that he should in due course tackle such matters as religion and the treatment of the dead? Like Godwin, he was consumed in his last years with a renewed interest in the critique of religion. But his scheme seemed to go Godwin one better, leaving no room for the imagination when confronting all the Auto-Icons artfully displayed to remind the living both of the dead individual’s strengths—Bentham was to be seated in his writing chair, a model of the serious author at work—and of the dead individual’s death. And a very egalitarian afterlife it might perhaps come to be, including both men and women: “If, at common expense poor and rich were Iconized, the beautiful commandment of Jesus would be obeyed; they would indeed ‘meet together’, they would be placed on the same level.” Utilitarianism, in his hands, was about heaven on earth, with Jesus helping the cause.

But this was to be a remarkably well-administered heaven, notable for its architectural innovations.

Worldly Fame, without Pushing

Among the very last things which his hand penned, in a book of memoranda, in which he was accustomed to note down any thought or feeling that passed through his mind, for future revision and use, if susceptible of use, was found the following passage:—‘I am a selfish man as selfish as any man can be. But in me, some how or other, so it happens, selfishness has taken the shape of benevolence. No other man is there upon earth, the prospect of whose sufferings would to me be a pleasurable one: no man is there upon earth, the sight of whose sufferings would not to me be a more or less painful one: no man upon earth is there, the sight of whose enjoyments, unless believed by me to be derived from a more than equivalent suffering endured by some other man, would not be of a pleasurable nature rather than of a painful one. Such in me is the force of sympathy!’

—SOUTHWOOD SMITH, “A LECTURE DELIVERED OVER
THE REMAINS OF JEREMY BENTHAM, ESQ.:
IN THE WEBB STREET SCHOOL OF ANATOMY
AND MEDICINE, ON THE 9TH OF JUNE, 1832.”

Bentham would certainly seem to differ drastically from Godwin on many counts: the scope of altruism, the natural harmony of interests that freedom could rely upon without the sanctions of codes and institutions, immaterialism, and the notion that some pleasures were simply, qua pleasures, better than others.37 But on some points they were plainly at one: the personal force of sympathy, and the imperative driving each to a pitch of intellectual honesty, and a devotion to following the argument wherever it led, as innocently as fearlessly.

Of course, thinking was one thing, publishing another. In Godwin’s case, that honesty led to fame followed by infamy; in Bentham’s, to obscurity followed by fame, with an ever increasing enhancement of his reputation. Bentham, it seems, was shrewdly willing to let rather more of his provocative thoughts remain unpublished during his early life. If he openly attacked the social contract view, and famously, in his Anarchical Fallacies (now better and more appropriately known as Nonsense upon Stilts, Bentham’s title), dismissed talk of natural rights as nonsense—and of natural and “imprescriptible” rights as “nonsense upon stilts”—he did not, early on, go out of his way to attack publicly religion and religious institutions, however little use he found for them. It was only late in life that he would call King George III a “great baby,” blast the “sinister interests” by name in an actionable way, and openly side with the democratic movement. Earlier on, he spent more of his time attacking law and lawyers, an activity often as welcome then as it is now, and placed much faith in the reforming potential of enlightened monarchs (as a child and youth, he had been in awe of George II and George III). His best known work to this day, the one usually singled out as the greatest classic of classical utilitarianism, was of course An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (which was thought out in the 70s and even printed in 1780, though not published until 1789), but it was not at all a plea for radical democracy, and in retrospect rather conspicuously failed to convey many key elements of Bentham’s views, even on such central topics as equality, liberty, and security. Bentham had in fact written a companion piece for it, Of Laws in General (now properly entitled Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence), largely complete in 1782, but not even published in finished form until 1945.

Bentham was also fortunate enough to have his fame develop more abroad than at home, thanks to the French edition of his writings assembled by the Genevan translator Pierre-Étienne-Louis Dumont, whose translating and editing produced the Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802) and other works. Bentham’s eventual success owed much to Dumont:

Dumont records that 3,000 copies of the Traités were initially distributed in France, and that it was “frequently quoted in many official compositions relating to civil or criminal codes.” Soon after, it was translated into Russian, and later into Spanish, German, Hungarian, Polish, and Portuguese. Other editions of the Traités followed. Reportedly, 50,000 copies of Dumont’s various recensions were sold in Europe in the early decades of the century and 40,000 in Spanish translation in Latin America alone.38 (45).

As a result of Dumont’s work, Bentham’s devoted foreign followers included such figures as Francisco de Paula Santander, vice president of Gran Colombia, who was only kept from making Bentham’s work required reading in law schools by a counter-edict from Simón Bolívar himself. And Bentham’s help was sought by such figures as José del Valle (who wanted him to draw up a civil code for Guatemala) and Pedro Alcántra de Somellera, a law professor at the University of Buenos Aires.³⁹ In the United States, he had such followers as “the historian and anti-slave propagandist Richard Hildreth”⁴⁰ and, as noted, Aaron Burr, influential but controversial friend of both Bentham and Godwin. He corresponded with James Madison, John Quincy Adams (whom he had met in London), and Andrew Jackson. In fact, as Crimmins has demonstrated, the influence of Bentham in the U.S. was far more important than is commonly recognized, with such popular periodicals as The Diamond and The Yankee proclaiming on their banners “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

Indeed, the international fame that Bentham achieved was truly extraordinary, and his influence was felt across the globe—in Russia (where he lived briefly, with his younger brother Samuel), France, Poland, Mexico, Latin and South America, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and many other places as well. Napoleon’s minister Talleyrand was counted a friend, and even Napoleon admired the extraordinarily successful Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802), despite Bentham having been made an honorary citizen of the French Republic in 1792. He would come to deserve the title “Legislator of the World,” bestowed on him by José del Valle for his determined efforts to go beyond piecemeal reform and effect a complete makeover of law, a complete law code or “pannomion” with every law duly rationalized, that could be applied globally.

But clearly, Dumont’s Bentham was not the radical republican and democrat so evident in the teens and twenties. The great utilitarian’s amazing global celebrity was, as in the case of Dumont and France, grounded on carefully controlled doses of Bentham’s writing. Frederick Rosen has explained:

Bentham’s first public declaration of his radical position came only with the appearance of his Plan of Parliamentary Reform in 1817. … Bentham’s reluctance to publish his radical views between 1809 or 1810 and 1817 was based partly on fear of prosecution. During the decade between 1815 and 1825, he developed radical critiques of law … [and] religion (Church of Englandism and Its Catechism Examined (1818), Not Paul but Jesus, published under a pseudonym, Gamaliel Smith, in 1823, and Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, also published under a pseudonym, Philip Beauchamp, in 1822), and economy in government (Defense of Economy against the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, written in 1810 but published in 1817). Bentham often published these against the advice of friends and colleagues, and had to choose radical publishers such as the Hunts, Richard Carlisle, and William Hone who were willing to face prosecution. He also developed a close relationship with Francis Place, whom he met through James Mill in 1812, and with whom he made contact with other writers deeply involved in radical politics, such as John Wade, Thomas Hodgskin, and William Thompson. Place and Bentham also co-operated in a number of radical schemes such as the Parliamentary Candidates Society in 1831.41

Although some hold that Bentham flirted with more democratic views at the time of the French Revolution, he clearly did not at that point follow Godwin’s example and announce them to the world, and his true conversion only came much later, following on a wave of worldly fame built on a strong but narrower current.

Thus, given that it took him a long lifetime to evolve his views, Bentham should have been the first to admit that the full implications of the greatest happiness principle, for politics and morals, were not always immediately evident. The paradox of that point is of course that he took the principle of utility to be a way of grounding law, politics, and morals on something clear and compelling, rather than on vague talk of natural rights, a moral sense, tradition, etc., the ambiguity of which simply allowed for capture by sinister interests able to exploit it. The judgment of the ruling elites, however glossed in the ancients, was corrupt and self-serving, and served to corrupt language itself. At his most philosophical, Bentham was a philosopher of language and a harbinger of later analytic philosophy, as both Bertrand Russell and W. V. Quine have recognized.⁴² And Rosen has noted that “most of Bentham’s important writings on logic and language were produced between 1813 and 1815, just as he was writing Chrestomathia and involved in the Chrestomathic school.” His chief work on ethics, the Deontology, was also written at this time, just before he came out as a true Philosophical Radical. The upshot of the more philosophical side of these works was the “theory of fictions,”43 in which Bentham urged, in good Russellian fashion, that linguistic reform via paraphrase could be used to eliminate from language fictitious entities—such as “natural rights”—terms that are too often taken as referring to something really existing. Such obfuscation was a deliberate tool of the sinister interests. Legal reform thus led him to a more Orwellian concern with fictions and fallacies and the snares of unreformed language, which in turn presaged his own greater clarity and concreteness about the political radicalism of his views. He was fighting fictions and fictitious entities on all fronts, from ghosts to governments.

But how did Bentham himself get to this point? Get, that is, both to the point where the greatest happiness principle would strike him like a thunderbolt, and to the point, nearly fifty years later, where it would move him to become such an original and radical reformer on so many fronts, from language to education to democracy to sexual morality to religion to the care of the dead, moving far in advance of both his global reputation and his intimate circle? If this is what his life looked like at the end, what did it look like at the beginning?

His own words on that subject are often the most striking. In recounting late in life a circumstance that “had much to do with the formation of my character,” he explained how when he was boarding at Westminster School, “a boy of the name of Cotton” would return on occasion to stay with his old bedfellow (named Mitford) and tell him stories, with Bentham eagerly eavesdropping:

While I was lying in bed, I heard from his mouth, stories which excited the liveliest interest in my mind; stories of his own invention; but in which the heroes and heroines were models of kindness and beneficence. They exhibited the quality to which I afterwards gave the name of effective benevolence; and I became enamored of that virtue. I remember forming solemn resolutions, that if ever I possessed the means, I would be an example of that excellence, which appeared so attractive to me. I lost sight of my unconscious instructor in after life; but in my controversies with government on the Panopticon projects, I was thrown into contact with a brother of that Cotton; and Mitford was stationed in the very next seat to him.⁴⁴

But earlier still, there was another formative experience that he would also recall time and again later in life:

Another book of far higher character was put into my hands. It was Telemachus. In my own imagination, and at the age of six or seven, I identified my own personality with that of the hero, who seemed to me a model of perfect virtue; and, in my walk of life, whatever it may come to be, why, said I to myself, every now and then, why should I not be Telemachus?45

This was, of course, the Telemachus of none other than the illustrious Archbishop Fénelon, made all the more famous by Godwin’s infamous dilemma. How ironic that Bentham could claim that this “romance may be regarded as the foundation-stone of my whole character; the starting-point from whence my career of life commenced. The first dawning in my mind of the principles of utility, may, I think, be traced to it.”⁴⁶

True to form, however, Bentham concluded that he could improve upon his hero, who in his estimation fell rather short of a rival in formulating the best principles of government. The rival had favored a view that “seemed, I say, to border, at least, on the principles of utility; or, in other words, the greatest happiness principle,” whereas the hero Telemachus was still too full of “a tissue of vague generalities, by which no clear impression was presented to my mind.” Bowring would later hear him “again and again” express “his vexation and disappointment at the poor display made by his favourite, who might, he thought, so much more honourably have won the palm. The goddess of Wisdom, wrapt up, as she was, in the greatcoat of an old man, was much lowered, in his estimation, for not distinguishing and recompensing the wisest of the competitors,” namely, the utilitarian rival of Telemachus.⁴⁷

These may seem like strange beginnings for the Bentham of popular caricature—stories of beneficence, a romance based on tales of the son of Odysseus, with no codification in sight. But as Bowring observes, the “impression made on Bentham’s mind by the books he read in his childhood, was lasting.”⁴⁸ And his early reading, which sometimes took place in the limbs of a “lofty elm tree,” was a very, very large part of his early life, an early life that was very much colored by his being constantly “talked of and to as a prodigy,” and taught “scorn and contempt for other boys.” Thus, he “was perpetually placed in a sort of estrangement, by hearing his companions described as dunces; and thus his vanity and pride received constant fuel.”⁴⁹

Bentham was a child of affluence, albeit a lonely and sensitive one. His father was Jeremiah Bentham (1712–1792), a prosperous, well-connected, and ambitious London attorney, whose father had also been a Jeremiah Bentham (1685–1741), a prosperous, well-connected, and ambitious London attorney. The father, somewhat severe, had every expectation that Jeremy would follow in this tradition. Bentham’s mother was Alicia Woodward Whitehorne, who died at a young age in 1759, when Jeremy was only ten. Of the couple’s seven children, only Jeremy and his much younger brother Samuel (1757–1831) had survived childhood.

Bentham was very fond of his mother, who was kind and affectionate, even if she had been a bit of a disappointment to grandfather Jeremiah, who had hoped for a better marriage for his son (she was also a widow, marrying for the second time). Bentham’s father would also marry for a second time, in 1766, but the stepmother, Sarah Abbot, was one of the reasons why Bentham preferred to live away from the Queen Square Place home. Relations with the father were sometimes strained and unpleasant as well. Rosen notes:

Bentham’s upbringing and early education was dominated by his father, who sought to develop his talents and produce not only an attorney like himself but also a future lord chancellor of England. Bentham was undeniably precocious, and his intellect was encouraged by his father in a way that resembled the education of John Stuart Mill a generation later. He began to learn Latin at the age of three . … Through his father’s friendship with William Markham, then headmaster of Westminster School, he was enrolled there at the age of seven in 1755. He became a king’s scholar before leaving for Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1760 at the age of twelve. He was unhappy at both institutions. Not only was he much younger than the other pupils, he was also small in stature, and physically weak. He had many interests, such as music (he became proficient on the violin, harpsichord, piano, and organ), natural science, and reading, and played battledore (a kind of badminton). But for the most part he was isolated and lonely, living under the crude and often unreasonable authority of his father. In this early period he became thoroughly familiar with the classical authors and the Bible. By the age of ten he could write in both Greek and Latin, and he acquired a reputation at school for writing verses in these languages. He was also known as ‘a little philosopher’, and, when pushed and prodded by his father, he would reluctantly display his precocity.50

According to his own reports, he was physically dwarfish, timid, shy, morbidly afraid of ghosts, goblins, and “the Devil’s imp,” and prone to nightmares. Books, flowers, and music were his chief comforts, from his childhood through his old age, and such was his love of beauty in these departments that it is very difficult to see how the depiction of him as the great boorish and fact-mongering anti-aesthete could ever have taken hold, at least among those who knew him. Bowring remarks, “[N]ever did he appear more delighted than when speaking of the two spots, Browning Hill and Barking, the country abodes in which his two grandmothers dwelt. He had, through life, the keenest sense of the beauties of nature; and, whenever he could be induced to quit his studies, his enjoyment of fields and flowers was as acute and vivid as that of a happy child.”⁵¹ The grandmothers appear to have been his childhood saviors.

The tensions with the father appear to have been at first mostly the result of his great ambitions for his son, and his unwillingness to recognize how sensitive the boy was. On Bentham’s recollection:

I never gave him any ground to complain of me. … My conduct may indeed have sometimes been a cause of regret and dissatisfaction to him; but on what ground? My ‘weakness and imprudence’ in keeping wrapt up in a napkin the talents which it had pleased God to confer on me—powers of raising myself to the pinnacle of prosperity. The seals were mine, would I but muster up confidence and resolution enough to seize them. He was continually telling me that everything was to be done by ‘pushing;’ but all his arguments failed to prevail on me to assume the requisite energy. ‘Pushing,’ would he repeat—‘pushing’ was the one thing needful; but ‘pushing’ was not congenial to my character.52

Such advice invariably failed to impress Bentham. In the 1760s, when advised by a friend that “If you mean to rise, catch hold of the skirts of those who are above you, and care nothing for those beneath you,” he “listened coldly to the advice; was coldly regarded, ever after, by the aspirant; and died, not a judge, but a philosopher.”⁵³

But his father and the rest of the family did apparently praise him at every turn, his father being always given to bragging about his prodigy of a son (and dismissing other children as dunces) and putting him on display before company. With cause, obviously, at least on the bragging side. Interestingly, as Rosen has noted, “Bentham’s father had numerous interests in the City of London and, for example, was involved for more than fifty years in securing the future of the Sir John Cass Charity located in Aldgate. At his death a silver cup, commemorating his father’s service, was presented by Bentham to the trustees in accordance with his father’s will.”⁵⁴ Thus, perhaps in some ways at least, Bentham did follow in his father’s footsteps. But much about the son eluded the senior Bentham, who seemingly had no clue that his son had a strong aversion to such sports as hunting. His famous sensitivity to the moral standing of nonhuman animals also appears to have had very early origins:

We had a servant, whose name was Martha: a woman of kindness and gentleness; and the kindness of her temper ameliorated mine. One day, while I was a little boy, I went into the kitchen. Some earwigs were running about. I laid hold of them, and put them into the candle. Martha gave me a sharp rebuke, and asked me, how I should like to be so used myself? The rebuke was not thrown away.⁵⁵

There were other such early incidents as well, and the young Bentham even conceived a dislike for fishing, which he deemed cruel and pointless, despite his occasional engagement in the practice.

Not all the servants were as kindly as Martha, and some of them apparently delighted in exploiting little Jeremy’s fears. “When my company became troublesome, a sure and continually repeated means of exonerating themselves from it, was for the footman to repair to the adjoining subterraneous apartments, invest his shoulders with some strange covering, and, concealing his countenance, stalk in, with a hollow, menacing, and inarticulate tone.”56 Small wonder that he suffered from both day and night terrors, sometimes walking about at night babbling in a nightmarish trance.

Bentham was sixteen when he earned his BA at Oxford, nineteen when he earned his MA, and may have been the youngest graduate Oxbridge had ever seen. According to Bowring, “Jacob Jefferson, who was appointed to be Bentham’s tutor, was a morose and gloomy personage, sour and repulsive—a sort of Protestant monk. His only anxiety about his pupil was, to prevent his having any amusement.”⁵⁷ Indeed, Bentham never had a good word to say about either Westminster School or Oxford, and he seems to have been more inspired by the obscure and unknown Cotton than by any of the faculty. “Generally speaking, the tutors and professors at Oxford offered nothing to win the affections of Bentham. Some of them were profligate; and he was shocked with their profligacy: others were morose; and their moroseness alienated him: but the greatest part of them were insipid; and he had no taste for insipidity.”⁵⁸

Worse still, there was the treatment of his hair:

A grievous annoyance to Bentham, at Oxford, was the formal dressing of his hair. ‘Mine,’ he said, ‘was turned up in the shape of a kidney: a quince or a club was against the statutes; a kidney was in accordance with the statutes. I had a fellow-student whose passion it was to dress hair, and he used to employ a part of his mornings in shaping my kidney properly.’⁵⁹

It is intriguing, however, that on the great issue of religious subscription—a torment to Bentham’s utilitarian successor Sidgwick—he recorded the following reflections.

The distress of mind which he experienced, when called on to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, he thus forcibly describes:

‘Understanding that of such a signature the effect and sole object was the declaring, after reflection, with solemnity and upon record, that the propositions therein contained were, in my opinion, every one of them true; what seemed to me a matter of duty was, to examine them in that view, in order to see whether that were really the case. The examination was unfortunate. In some of them no meaning at all could I find; in others no meaning but one which, in my eyes, was too plainly irreconcilable either to reason or to scripture. Communicating my distress to some of my fellow-collegiates, I found them sharers in it. Upon inquiry it was found, that among the fellows of the college there was one, to whose office it belonged, among other things, to remove all such scruples. We repaired to him with fear and trembling. His answer was cold; and the substance of it was—that it was not for uninformed youths, such as we, to presume to set up our private judgments against a public one, formed by some of the holiest as well as best and wisest men that ever lived. … I signed: but by the view I found myself forced to take of the whole business, such an impression was made, as will never depart from me but with life.’60

This scar would last a very long time, as his late works on Church of Englandism demonstrate at great and overheated length.

Nor was revulsion against the established religion the only lesson learned at Oxford. Just before the age of sixteen, when already at Lincoln’s Inn, Bentham returned to Oxford to attend lectures on jurisprudence by the famous William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England. This made his revulsion complete, encompassing both religion and law, and famously set him on the path of finding his “genius” in the area of legal reform, the odious Oxford behind him.⁶¹

In 1763 Bentham began his legal studies at Lincoln’s Inn at the Inns of Court, and he was admitted to the bar in 1769, though by that point the combined force of his revulsion to Blackstone’s lectures and rapture over Priestly’s presentation of the principle of the greatest happiness had determined him not to practice law, but to criticize it—indeed, to wage guerrilla warfare against it—despite making Lincoln’s Inn his primary residence for many years. It was at Lincoln’s Inn that in 1781 he became familiar with William Petty, Earl of Shelburne (later Marquess of Lansdowne), establishing a relationship that would prove to be of considerable importance to his career. Bentham was still a Tory of sorts, but Shelburne (the figure in Bentham’s famous dream) was a very influential Whig politician, one who would briefly serve as prime minister in 1782–83. He was friendly with the Pitts and other important political figures, but also unusually interested in ideas and intellectuals, seeking out such figures as Priestly, Richard Price, and Bentham. It was through these connections that Bentham met Dumont, the man who would do so much to make him a global celebrity, and through these connections that the Panopticon scheme almost became a reality.

And it was at the Shelburne estate, Bowood, which Bentham regularly visited, that he emerged as a favorite of “the ladies of the house,” who “engaged him at chess and billiards, and shared his devotion to music.”⁶² It was there that he met Lady Shelburne’s niece, Caroline Fox, who, despite being nearly twenty years younger, would ultimately become the object of Bentham’s marriage proposal, in 1805, and a deep lifelong love. She was the second great love of Bentham’s life, the first having been Mary (Polly) Dunkley, who was only ten years his junior, and with whom he fell deeply in love in the 70s. According to Rosen, “Dunkley, the orphaned daughter of an Essex surgeon, lacked a fortune, and Bentham’s father strongly opposed the relationship. For a time Bentham considered supporting himself by writing, but he abandoned his plan and the relationship eventually ended.”63 On this score, Bentham senior apparently did not want his son to follow in his own footsteps and marry low. But when he tried to marry high, with Caroline Fox, the tables were politely turned, and he was the one rejected as unsuitable. ⁶⁴

But there is more to the story. As Schofield explains:

Bentham needed to make a name for himself—he reckoned that, in order to marry Polly Dunkley, he needed to increase his income, and he could do this by publishing a devastating attack on the leading legal writer of his age. A Fragment on Government was, therefore, published anonymously, and gained some degree of attention. Jeremiah, now acting the role of the proud father, let it be known that his son was the author. But once it was discovered that the author was an obscure, briefless barrister, all interest in the work ceased; sales dried up; and Jeremy did not acquire a fortune sufficient to marry Polly.⁶⁵

Although the evidence from Bentham’s correspondence is somewhat skimpy, with important letters missing, it appears that Bentham fell in love with Polly in 1774, and that the relationship lasted more than two years, well beyond the point at which Bentham had promised his father that he would break it off. The tensions with his bragging father in this case no doubt reinforced Bentham in his desire for independence.

But what of Caroline Fox, the woman to whom Bentham would propose not once, but twice? She was the sister of Lord Holland and, if Bentham is to be believed, the most endearing individual ever to walk the earth, even if “her face was rather long—and a Fox mouth, with a set of teeth white but too large, ‘saved her from being a beauty.’” Bentham described her to his father as a “sprightly good-natured girl, not fourteen, but forward for her age.”⁶⁶ In a fuller account, related to Bowring in the strictest confidence, he explained:

He met her at Bowood, when she was very young, and he thirty-four. He was struck with that voluntary playfulness which formed so pleasing a contrast to the aristocratical reserve of most of the females whom he met. … One day when Bentham was sitting playing at the spinette … a light screen near the instrument was turned over upon him, and a young lady glided away upon feet of feathers.

This was in marked contrast to the “Dignity” that was “the feminine tone of the family.”⁶⁷ She was, in a word, fun, and Bentham was too. The memory of the fun would remain so sharp that in later life, even “in his playfulness, the introduction of her name, or any circumstance connected with her name, would overpower him with melancholy.”⁶⁸

He waited over twenty years before proposing, and when he did, her playfulness was less in evidence as she admonished him to remember his duty to humanity:

It is in your power, however, to make me easy, if you will instantly, without the waste of a single day, return to those occupations from which the world will hereafter derive benefit, and yourself renown. I have enough to answer for already, in having interrupted your tranquility, (God knows how unintentionally,)—let me not be guilty of depriving mankind of your useful labours, of deadening the energy of such a mind as yours. No, I have heard wise people say, and I hope it is true, (though not to the honour of our sex,) that single men achieve the greatest things. Pray, pray, rouse all the powers of your mind—you certainly have weapons to combat this idle passion, which other men, with vacant heads, have not. Let me, as a last request, entreat you to do it, and to devote all the time you can spare from your studies to your friends in Russell Square. There is not a man upon earth who loves you more affectionately than Mr. Romilly—I know he does; and his wife’s society, you acknowledge, is soothing to you. Do this for my sake, and allow me to hope that, before I have quite reached my grand climacteric, I may again shake hands with you: it would be too painful to think it never could again be so. In the meantime, God bless you, and be assured of the unalterable good wishes and regards of the two spinsters.69

This artful but all too direct deployment of the greatest happiness principle against its greatest champion was no doubt the cause of much pain on Bentham’s part, but he never really gave up. In 1827, he would write to her, “I am alive: more than two months advanced in my 80th year—more lively than when you presented me, in ceremony, with the flower in the green lane. Since that day, not a single one has passed, (not to speak of nights,) in which you have not engrossed more of my thoughts than I could have wished.” Nor, it seems, was it altogether in fun that he also wrote, “I have, for some years past, had a plan for building a harem in my garden, upon the Panopticon principle. The Premiership waits your acceptance.”⁷⁰

And yet a third love (beyond of course the principle of utility) deserves mention here. Amelia Curran, who was an Irish artist introduced to Bentham by his friend—and (along with Place) common link to Godwin—Aaron Burr. Burr stayed with Bentham, using his mailing address, during his time of European exile, from 1808 to 1812, and he introduced Amelia to him in 1811. She was to paint Bentham’s portrait, and spent much time with him at Queen’s Square Place, which he had inherited upon his father’s death in 1792. She apparently became quite close to Bentham, who took the place in her heart that Burr had previously occupied, especially while Burr was away in other parts of Europe. Bentham and Burr were reconciled; what became of the relationship with Amelia remains a mystery, though she did become friendly with Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who allowed her to paint some portraits of him, apparently a unique honor.

One cannot help but wonder what schemes of improvement the great projector would have brought to conjugal relations and to the raising of his own children.71 But it is telling that when it came to love, Bentham was not at all smitten with aristocratic dignity or conventional opinion. A fortuneless orphan, a spirited and fun-loving young girl, and an Irish artist—these were the ones who won his heart and apparently did so precisely in degree to their emancipation from what Mill would call the subjection of women.

In any event, the mere fact that Bentham even had a love life, with serious ups and downs, heartbreaks and rejections, is sufficient to make one doubt Mill’s depiction of him as a man who “knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart … a boy to the last.” And although Bentham himself called Queen’s Square Place his Hermitage, and himself the Hermit of it, there is an ever growing body of evidence that he was not such a hermit as all that. He loved his long summer at Shelburne’s Bowood in 1781, enjoying being in such an illustrious intellectual circle, even if they did charge him with eating too much. And in due course he would rent his own country home, Ford Abbey, where he would spend half the year from 1814 to 1818. As Catherine Fuller has shown, Bentham’s life at Ford Abbey also counters the vision of him as incapable “of any emotional depth, of experiencing pleasure, or of expressing sympathy.”⁷² In fact, Ford Abbey afforded Bentham all the pleasures that his conception of happiness could ask for. He had his many guests—which included Place, the Romillys, and the entire Mill family, who lived there when Bentham did, otherwise near him in London—walking and jogging around the grounds, playing shuttlecock, listening to and playing music, and taking keen delight in all the flowers and fruits that Bentham, a most earnest horticulturalist, produced. The spacious building and grounds proved remarkably enabling for Bentham, allowing for much experimentation, including that with his famous frigidarium. As many have noted, his cast of mind was really less turgidly legalistic than scientific, even botanical, in its love of identification and classification. Ford Abbey afforded his powers their full scope, and it was in this happy period and place that he took the previously described turn, coming out on so many controversial issues. If the elements of happiness or well-being include social connectedness, health and activity, mindfulness and continued learning or curiosity, and giving, then Bentham was at many points in his life undoubtedly happy, though primarily so late in life.

Prisoners and Paupers

No doubt Bentham’s life at Lincoln’s Inn, Queen’s Square Place, and his other occasional residences (including the Russian village of Zadobrast) was not as sociable and sympathetic as his life at Ford Abbey or Bowood. He was, to be sure, extremely disciplined in his work habits—Bowring claimed that Bentham usually worked at his studies and writing from ten to twelve hours a day—and on some reports he was more introspective and uncomfortable in large company than was his sociable brother Samuel, to whom, however, he was deeply devoted. He was admittedly bashful, and according to Schofield, Bentham “was known to refuse to see visitors who called at his house unannounced, and whom he saw no use in seeing. … He had a very particular daily regimen, which included his ‘antejentacular circumgyration’ or early afternoon jog, reading and answering his correspondence, and, of course, writing his works. His habit was to invite one guest to dinner, when he would be joined by his two amanuenses.”73

At any rate, it was Samuel’s pursuit of a career as a naval architect that had helped plant the idea of the Panopticon prison scheme in Bentham’s mind, and that led the two brothers to believe that they might be a big success in Catherine II’s Russia. It was in the course of building up Russian connections that Bentham had met Shelburne, and many other worthies as well. Samuel would move to Russia in 1779, not returning until 1791. Bentham followed him in 1785, but only stayed for some twenty months, leaving without the hoped for success.

During these middle years, Bentham certainly knew his share of frustration and heartache, not only in love, but also in work. Again, it is eminently plausible that his many changes of heart in the 1810s reflected his growing frustration with supposedly enlightened monarchs and recognition that the legal reforms he favored could only come about if major democratic political reforms opened the way and obstacles to reform—educational and religious—were cleared away. Both King George III and the Empress Catherine would prove to be less helpful than originally supposed, a story that would repeat itself with many other statesman and leaders. Having tried the powers that be, Bentham had to take his cause to the powers that could and should be, the only powers capable of unseating the sinister interests of Church and State—namely, the people, who, he now judged, were generally the best judges of their own happiness, at least if they were not criminal or indigent. And such shifting beliefs were surely aided and abetted by his friendships with the remarkable Francis Place and James Mill and family.

Even if Bentham was also obsessed with the larger vision of legal reform, the great and chief cause of his mid-life failures and frustrations was his Panopticon scheme for prison reform.⁷⁴ Actually, the Panopticon—or “All-seeing” from the Greek—was an architectural scheme of wide application, suitable to be adapted and deployed in reforms in various arenas—education, poverty relief, medical care, and asylums among them. The scheme promised much:

Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the Gordian knot of the Poor Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture! … A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse.

The plan was in fact set out in a series of letters that Bentham sent from Russia during his time there, letters sent to his father (who supported him with a modest stipend), but which were published together, with two very lengthy postscripts, in 1791. Bentham really had, as Schofield observes, gotten the basic idea from his brother Samuel when they were in Russia together:

The panopticon … was the brainchild of Bentham’s brother Samuel, when employed in the 1780s on the estates of Prince Potemkin at Krichev in the Crimea, part of the Russian Empire. He found that, by organizing his workforce in a circular building, with himself at the centre, he could supervise their activities more effectively. Visiting Samuel in the late 1780s and seeing the design, Bentham immediately appreciated its potential. Enshrining the principle of inspection, the panopticon might be adapted as a mental asylum, hospital, school, poor house, factory and, of course, prison. The prison building would be circular, with the cells, occupying several storeys one above the other, placed around the circumference. At the centre of the building would be the inspector’s lodge, which would be so constructed that the inspector would always be capable of seeing into the cells, while the prisoners would be unable to see whether they were being watched. The activities of the prisoners would be transparent to the inspector; his actions, insofar as the prisoners were concerned, were hid behind a veil of secrecy. On the other hand, it was a cardinal feature of the design that the activities of the inspector and his officials should be laid open to the general scrutiny of the public, who would be encouraged to visit the prison.75

Or, in Bentham’s words:

To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or madhouses, or hospitals, or schools.⁷⁶

It was this vision of social control, disciplining and controlling via architecture, that led Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, to immortalize Bentham as the social theorist above all others who had captured the essence of the modern surveillance state and modern power, power become invisible and used, cruelly, to create, define and control the identities of those subject to it: the “criminal mind,” the “sexual deviant,” the “psychopathological case,” etc.77 As Schofield has dryly observed, one would never guess from Foucault’s account “that the panopticon prison was never built, that standard prison architecture went in a very different direction from that advocated by Bentham, and that Bentham himself did not regard the panopticon as a model for the state.”⁷⁸

And of course, as Foucault well knew, Bentham regarded the whole scheme as the humane alternative to the violence of the state being inflicted on criminals at every turn.⁷⁹ On the reigning “Bloody Code,” hundreds of often relatively minor offenses were subject to the death penalty or to “transportation,” which involved having criminals sent to Australia (or New South Wales, as it was called) and was often tantamount to a death sentence. Proposals in 1786 for a resumption of “transportation” and a new penitentiary in Ireland had spurred Bentham to throw himself into the effort to reform the whole system of crime and punishment, work that was, after all, very much in keeping with the humane reformism of Helvétius and Beccaria that had so influenced him. Mere retributive punishment, rather than future-oriented rehabilitation and example, has always been one of the chief objects of utilitarian criticism, whether it comes in the form of mundane systems of criminal justice or Divine eschatological schemes. Punishment merely for retribution, with no felicific effect on future developments, was a mere addition of needless pain to the world. On this, Bentham and Godwin and their successors were entirely at one, and entirely in opposition to much religious morality.

Still, various of Bentham’s remarks do seem to lend some credence to Foucault’s fears about power taking more sinister forms, as controlling invasions of the psyche. The only adequate response to such concerns is to paint a broader and richer picture of the society that Bentham did envision, and how the state would figure in it. After all, a certain picture does emerge, in the unfolding of Bentham’s life, of an ambitious, deeply radical, program for social reform, despite the fact that he defeats most attempts to capture him as an unambiguous advocate of, not only the surveillance state, but also the laissez-faire “night watchman” state, the professionalized bureaucratic state, the imperial state, and so forth. True, he seems to advance a moveable feast of arguments and issues and priorities, such as the need to eliminate perverse incentives, curb sinister interests, make law and other social institutions clear and transparent, and create that security that, to his mind, involved the solid guarantee for various liberties through state action. Again, he was no champion of the view that “liberty” meant a kind of Hobbesian noninterference; civil liberty was structured and underwritten by the state, which needed to provide such oversight as might be necessary to keep some from interfering with others, providing security. But there is an undercurrent to his various schemes that gives them a clearer direction than any such summary suggests, and this amounts to rather more than the familiar “principle of self-preference” and “means-prescribing or junction-of-interests prescribing principle,” which of course were simply means to realizing the greatest happiness. Everything was in the name of the principle of utility, or better, the greatest happiness, but happiness could be a very progressive notion.

In midlife he still clung to the view that he had only to enlighten political leaders sufficiently and they would give his plans a try, just as he sought to guide the leaders of the French revolution. Even though the death of his father in 1792 and his consequent inheritance (which included Queen’s Square Place) had relieved Bentham of any worries about his own financial security, he was as determined as ever to see the Panopticon realized, whether or not he himself needed the position of “inspector.”

It nearly happened. Shelburne, now Landsdowne, sent the Panopticon scheme to Sir John Parnell, chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, who expressed some enthusiasm for it, as did others around the world. Most importantly, in a great irony of history, William Pitt the younger, the persecutor of Godwin and his friends, was in fact a supporter of Bentham and the Panopticon. Bentham had impressed him (and many others) with the model of the structure that he kept in his London home. But somehow, the final deal never got closed:

Negotiations concerning various locations for the prison ran into numerous difficulties, as few wanted a prison on or near their estates, and the whole idea of public inspection depended on the prison being situated on an accessible and convenient site. For a brief period, when Long offered Bentham the Salisbury estate at Millbank, and Bentham actually acquired the land in November 1799, it seemed that the project would go forward. But Pitt resigned in 1801 without authorizing the prison, and the Addington administration kept Bentham waiting until 1803 before saying that the government was unwilling to fund the project. The Treasury considered panopticon again in 1811–12, when Bentham was still willing to be governor, but in October 1813 he finally gave up hope and accepted £23,000 in compensation.80

And turned to philosophy, education, democracy, etc., being less concerned at this point to cultivate the sinister interests that he now recognized as such.

The whole episode is worthy of Dickensian satire, indeed recalls the “circumlocution office” in Little Dorrit. Indeed, although it is usually supposed that Dickens had rigidly made up his mind about the Benthamites, he might have been more receptive to Benthamism than the popular wisdom would have it, and may have recognized that many of his targets—for example, the ancient Court of Chancery, blasted in Dickens’s Bleak House—were also Bentham’s targets.81 The more so since Bentham’s efforts on behalf of the prison scheme became, in the mid-1790s, entangled with his efforts to reform the Poor Laws and institute a scheme for the indigent, a Panopticon Industry House. His work on the poor and indigent is remarkably illuminating of the ways in which he was willing to adapt the workings of the Panopticon to different circumstances, and on this, as on education, his actual views can be better grasped by setting them against their more (supposedly) Dickensian interpretations. For it was not only the character of Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times that has often been read as directed against the utilitarians; what may be the best loved Dickens novel of all, after A Christmas Carol, was also aimed at them, at least according to the critics. And as Dickens biographer Michael Slater notes, in his account of Dickens writing Oliver Twist:

Dickens completed what he called his ‘glance at the new Poor Law Bill’ with an account of Oliver’s sufferings at a ‘baby-farm.’ This was highly topical in early 1837 following a great scandal about child deaths at such an establishment in St. James’s, Westminster, to which Cruik-shank claimed to have drawn Dickens’s attention. Dickens introduced the character of Bumble the parish beadle, who gloriously transcends the beadle figure as already established in popular folklore (and used by Dickens in Sketches) and offers a devastating caricature both of the Utilitarian philosophy underlying the New Poor Law and of its often grotesque results in practice. The whole installment is superbly clinched by the now legendary scene of Oliver asking for more.⁸²

The scene in question is of course the one in which a young, innocent, and half-starved Oliver Twist asks for a second helping of food, only to be met with outrage, derision, and punishment.

It is true that Bentham’s name was associated with the “new” Poor Law that had come into being in the 1830s, replacing the old system (dating back to the reign of Elizabeth I) of local parish relief that offered, in a very inconsistent and unstable way, both indoor relief (workhouses) and outdoor relief (support at home), financed by the “poor rate.” The old system was in a state of crisis in the mid-nineties, being both extremely costly and extremely inefficient, and it was at that juncture that Bentham weighed in with his proposals. He was drawn into the controversies by his friend and admirer, the great reformer William Wilberforce, an ally in the Panopticon scheme who was also advising Pitt on the reform of the Poor Laws, and who sent Bentham a draft of a new Poor Bill early in 1796. Bentham sent back many comments on the draft, but was also stimulated to produce a large body of work on the subject.⁸³

The first thing to note about his proposals is that, as was so often the case, they were never truly adopted. Indeed, attention-getting though they should have been, they never actually received much attention. Bentham called for nothing less than a system of some 250 “industry houses” spread across the county, each of which could service some 2,000 paupers, adding up to a total of roughly half a million people. The system was projected to grow as it became more successful, within twenty years producing 500 houses serving a million paupers. A joint stock National Charity Company, governed by a central board, would administer this system, appointing governors for each individual institution and collecting revenues from the poor rates, share subscriptions, and the labor of the inmates—revenues that would in due course render the scheme positively profitable. The Company would have a wide range of obligations and powers. If it had to admit anyone who came to it seeking aid, it could also force certain types (orphans, paupers, and vagrants) to be admitted to an appropriate house. Inmates would be apprentices, and they could leave after their work had paid off the costs of keeping them, though minors would be kept until the age of twenty-one, if male, or nineteen, if female.

The National Charity Company scheme does put the companion Panopticon scheme in perspective. Indeed, the Panopticon seems like a modest effort by comparison. Gertrude Himmelfarb has infamously observed how Bentham “while declaring the usury laws an intolerable infringement on free trade, had a penchant for schemes involving a considerable degree of regimentation and for monopolistic establishments of unprecedented size.” Poor relief was a case in point, with his scheme for a huge privately run company “with an exclusive contract for the support and employment of over 10 percent of the population of England.”84 This was a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the principle of indoor relief. Most alarmingly, Bentham allowed that in “order to apprehend ‘suspected depredators’ (suspected because they were without visible means of support),” it would be necessary to establish a “Universal Register of names, abodes and occupations.” If this seemed like a massive infringement of liberty, Bentham explained, the kind of liberty in question was “doing mischief” and security was more important, even for those being detained: “The persons in question are a sort of forward children—a set of persons not altogether sound in mind, not altogether possessed of that moral sanity without which a man cannot in justice to himself any more than to the community be intrusted with the uncontrolled management of his own conduct and affairs.”⁸⁵

But as David Lieberman has perceptively noted, in a more balanced review of Bentham’s Poor Law writings:

Eligibility rules discarded the familiar categories of deserving and undeserving poor: need, rather than desert was the key qualification. Others who did not seek relief—such as vagrants and beggars—would be coercively required to enter and contribute their labor to the company’s production. In its full network of responsibilities, the National Charity Company’s operations would not only replace the current system of poor laws, but also supplant the better part of established rules governing settlement, vagrancy, apprenticeship, and employment. Public functions currently undertaken by the parish and the church would instead fall within the orbit of a joint-stock company enterprise.

One obvious and important point of interest in these writings is the “inspection-house” or panopticon architecture Bentham specified for the pauper industry houses. Owing to the deep impact of Michel Foucault’s discussion in Discipline and Punish (1979), for many scholars Bentham remains above all associated with “panopticonism.” Foucault’s treatment drew on a very limited set of texts, drawn from Bentham’s earliest plan for a panopticon prison. Foucault ignored Bentham’s own lengthy revisions and elaborations of the prison project. And the subsequent discussion of “panopticonism” (at least in English) has largely and unfortunately ignored the case of pauper panopticons. As an exercise in inspection-house architecture, “Pauper Management Improved” dwarfed the prison project and demands attention in any consideration of this element of Bentham’s thought. Panopticon technology—locating the pauper inmates in a space that placed their conduct at any moment under the “inspection” or surveillance of others—was critical. “Without the benefit of inspection,” Bentham maintained, “I would not be responsible for the conduct or condition of a single individual” (p. 105). But in this setting, Bentham made more emphatic than in the prison project both the range of persons whose actions he placed under inspection and the limits of architecture as an instrument of control. With regard to range, Bentham emphasized how much his technologies of inspection were directed at the company managers rather than the pauper inmates alone. The inspection-house design exposed to external view the conduct of the National Charity Company’s personnel, and this transparency would provide a powerful restraint against potential abuses. At the same time, architecture served as but one of several technologies needed to secure the plan’s goals to ensure reliable performance. As in his later program for the administration of the democratic state, Bentham emphasized how often written records would supplant architecture as the instrument of choice for institutional transparency and systematic inspection. The operations of the National Charity Company were to be equipped with a new system of comprehensive record-keeping. Whereas traditional bookkeeping provided an account of revenues and expenditures, the National Charity Company’s required “system of book-keeping will be neither more nor less than the history of the system of management in all its points (p. 541).”86

Indeed, as Michael Quinn has also stressed, “Bentham’s discussion of poverty involved much more than the minute exposition of a specific plan of reform: it encompassed an investigation of the basic principles on which provision of relief should be grounded, and a sustained comparison of alternative systems of relief.”87 Quinn summarized those principles as follows:

First, since the aim was to prevent starvation, relief should be limited to ‘the necessaries of life.’ Second, since laboring for subsistence was mankind’s inescapable condition, the indigent too, excepting only those utterly incapable, should be required to labour. Third, since out-allowances, that is cash welfare payments, were incompatible with the efficient extraction of labour, the indigent should be obliged to enter large-scale Industry-Houses, and remain there until the expense of relief was recovered.⁸⁸

In that vein, Bentham himself made it very clear from the start that, with this issue too, the language was in serious need of reform:

The proper object of the system of laws, known in this country by the name of the Poor Laws, is to make provision for the relief not of poverty but of indigence.

The distinction between poverty and indigence is an article of fundamental and primary importance.

Poverty is the state of everyone who, in order to obtain subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour.

Indigence is the state of him who, being destitute of property (or at least destitute of the specifies of property necessary to the immediate satisfaction of the particular want by which he happens to be pressed), is at the same time either unable to labour, or unable, even for labour, to procure the supply of which he happens thus to be in want.

Poverty as above defined is the natural, the primitive, the general, and the unchangeable lot of man. The condition of persons whose property has placed them in what are termed opulent or easy circumstances, that is, who live upon the permanently recurring produce of labour already in store, is but an exception, which, under the most equal distribution of the stock thus laid up, could never, for any length of time, be very extensive.

As labour is the source of wealth, so is poverty of labour. Banish poverty, you banish wealth. ⁸⁹

Thus, indigence was the issue, and this reform scheme (like the prison scheme) in fact involved what was in key respects a two-way system of transparency, such that those in charge were also subject to careful public inspection—a point that in our own day of unregulated financial markets and official secrecy seems of singular importance. And these are the matters that, as Quinn has pointed out, may well have been the most influential elements of Bentham’s writings. One of Bentham’s secretaries in his later years, Edwin Chadwick, who had helped edit his poor law writings, became the secretary of the commission “whose report laid the foundation of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.” “The Commission’s Report contained many features derived directly from those writings; for instance, the definition of poverty as dependence on labour for subsistence; the insistence on the impossibility of relieving poverty, as opposed to indigence; the insistence on a national rather than local system; and, most centrally, the work-house test (i.e. the insistence on indoor-relief for the able-bodied), and the principle of less eligibility.”90

Which is to say that Bentham was in fact influential on this subject, but quite indirectly and at the more abstract level of conceptualizing the relevant issues and incentives. The particulars of his planned National Charity Company were not realized in the reforms; as remarked, they were not even much noticed. Plausibly, at the more philosophical level, Himmelfarb is right in maintaining that Bentham’s notion of pauperism “enlarged the scope of the term by extending it to the considerable number of working poor who would be confined in his industry-houses,” whereas the politically successful reformers “deliberately narrowed it precisely to exclude the laboring poor from the compass of the New Poor Law.”⁹¹ But that does not capture the dynamic process of reform that he apparently had in mind.

Although Bentham developed his plans for poor law reform well before his radicalization in the 1810s, he apparently continued to cleave to his ideas, and late in life planned to reissue Pauper Management. But on some points, his thinking did apparently shift. One great point of pride in Bentham’s scheme was that the envisioned system would be not only one of self-supply, with the inmates producing what was needed to cover their own subsistence (and more), but also one in which the economic value of children would be maximized. In fact, children, being cheap to feed, small to house, etc., held great potential as human capital, and their numbers, Bentham urged, should be increased by facilitating early marriage among the apprentices. But with the appearance of Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, with its argument that procreation among the poor was rampant and a grave threat to all, Bentham appears to have rethought that part of his program. The connections are not entirely clear, but after 1806, at least, “Bentham endorsed Malthus’s principle of population, while rejecting ‘moral restraint,’ Malthus’s pain-imposing solution to population pressure, in favour of pleasure-giving ‘unprolific’ sex (whether unprolific by birth control or homosexuality).”⁹²

But Bentham’s thoughts on the subject of children are far more complex and revealing than one would ever guess from the writings of his detractors.

The Visionary

Now, it is at just this point that one can gain a deeper appreciation of Bentham by considering the web of connecting themes that extends between his writings on the Panopticon, the Poor Laws and other topics, particularly those on education, sexuality, and religion. Just as the Panopticon writings are better viewed through the lens of the Poor Law writings, both are better viewed through a wider angle lens that captures Bentham at his most visionary, intimating some of his deeper convictions about human nature and suggesting some of his fonder hopes for humanity.

Plainly, Bentham and the other Philosophical Radicals adopted an associationist psychology that in Enlightenment fashion stressed the power of environmental conditioning, of nurture over nature, such that a more effective educational or socialization process would, its proponents were confident, produce more effectively utilitarian citizens—be they former paupers, criminals, or whatever.93 The right system could turn “dross” into “sterling,” “grind rogues honest,” and so on. But for all that, Bentham’s thoughts on psychology, child development, and education do point to some more complicating factors, and some additional counters to the (supposed) Dickensian and Foucauldian critiques. In a little-celebrated footnote in his Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved, Bentham explained the need for a “Child’s progress book” or “Calendar of Hebe” (on the model of a Calendar of Flora used by Botanists to trace the growth of vegetation), and he set out the following needed data:

1. —Advances independent of instruction—first indication of fear; smiling; recognizing persons; indication of a preference for a particular person; indication of a dislike for a particular person; attention to musical sounds; crowing; appearance of first tooth; appearance of each of the successive teeth; duration and degree of pain and illness in cutting teeth; giving food or toys to others; attempt to imitate sound; laughing; general progress in bodily or intellectual requirements, whether uniform, or by sudden degree.—2. Advances dependent upon instruction:—standing, supported by one arm; standing supporting itself, by resting the hands; token of obedience to will of others; command of natural evacuations; walking, supporting itself by chairs; standing alone; walking alone; pointing out the seat of pain, &c.⁹⁴

Although such thoughts may not represent a breakthrough in the pediatric or child development literature, they do suggest that Bentham had some sense of the need for close observation of children and for recognizing factors that occurred “independent of instruction.”

A comparison of Bentham’s work on pauper management and his chief work on education, Chrestomathia (meaning “conducive to useful learning”), can in some ways specially illuminate the deeper views of the man so often accused of being a man-child himself, incapable of any rounded appreciation of human nature and development. Ultimately, it is Bentham’s understanding of the heart of humanity, of what makes for pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, that has to be considered, in order to make sense of his views on utility or what would be productive of happiness. A too quick dismissal of him as reducing the whole of human psychological development to economistic calculation in the crudest of cost/benefit terms cannot capture either his often quite probing analysis of human failings and foibles or the subtlety of the sanctions and educational tactics needed. If money and power were effective rewards, so were prestige and dignity.95 If learning needed to be useful, it could also be, for that very reason, empowering.

After all, there were progressive features to Bentham’s chief educational work. His proposed day school for middle-class students—one was to be housed in the garden of Queen Square Place—in itself reflected an extension of educational opportunity, an effort to provide educational resources that would not be restricted by class, race, religion, or gender. Moreover, he detested cruelty, including the stock forms of corporal punishment routinely used by schoolmasters. His notions of classroom management emphasized the use of spirited competition instead of corporal punishment, the division of students into groups distinguished by ability, the mentoring of younger students by older students, and the effective use of visual aids and other devices to enliven and clarify instruction. If he was obsessed with the micromanagement of schools for useful learning that would lead to employment, he was also clear that “the common end of every person’s education is Happiness,” and that the larger aims of education included:

1. Securing to the possessor a proportionable share of general respect. … 2. Security against ennui, viz. the condition of him who, for want of something in prospect that would afford him pleasure, knows not what to do with himself, a malady to which, on retirement, men of business are particularly exposed. … 3. Security against inordinate sensuality, and its mischievous consequences./ 4. Security against idleness, and consequent mischievousness. … 5. Security for admission into, and agreeable intercourse with, good company: i. e. company in, or from which, present and harmless pleasure, or future profit or security, or both, may be obtained.⁹⁶

Bentham’s interest in this proposed school, which shared some of the design features of the Panopticon prison scheme, was stimulated by his allies Francis Place and Edward Wakefield, whose elaborate schemes for “schools for all” reflected other influences as well. As Southwood Smith noted, the Benthamites were much impressed, in 1813–17, by the work initiated by

Mr Lancaster and modified and extended by Dr Bell … if it were true, as stated by Mr Gray, that since he had introduced this system into his school, his whole class had gained a more extensive knowledge of the Latin language than he had ever known on any former occasion; that not a single boy had failed; that it had enabled him entirely to abolish corporal punishment; that it had animated his whole school with one spirit, making them all advance in the intellectual career with the like ardour, and though not with equal success, without a single failure, and that Mr Lancaster had put into his hands an instrument which had enabled him to realize his fondest visions in his most sanguine mood;—if such results were obtained by the application of this instrument to the acquisition of Latin and Greek, what, said Mr Bentham, may not be expected from its application to the whole field of knowledge? 97

Of course, Bentham deemed it a great waste of time and talent to devote most of schooling to “the dead languages.” But his emphasis on the useful was, at one level, more an antidote to a curriculum that ignored science and taught subservience than an antidote to poetry. Dickens’s satirical portrait of Benthamism in Hard Times has the poor, young Sissy Jupe subjected to the suffocating schooling of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M’Choakumchild, who dismiss all poetry as idle Fancy—“Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” On such grounds wallpaper representing horses and carpets representing flowers are to be condemned, since “you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact.” But Bentham would not have recognized his vision of the aims of education in that deadening scenario. His aim, however problematic the means, was democratic empowerment, not docility; self-respect, not humiliation. The larger issue was well put in a letter from Francis Place to William Allen:

How few are there on whom you can rely for active co-operation in promoting the happiness of the people! Your connection is principally among those whose rank is at the top of the middles class, who, enjoying wealth and leisure, might be expected to possess the disposition to do the greatest service to humanity, with the knowledge necessary to give full effect to their disposition. But is this so? Alas, it is not so, and it cannot be expected to exist in any great quantity as we descend! Why is this? Plainly because of ignorance; people do not see how much is in their power; they doubt their own ability to effect any real and permanent good on a large scale, and they therefore attribute the evils they have no hope of removing to the very constitution of society. They would remove the evils they are constantly obliged to witness, but unable to contemplate the possibility of accomplishing their wishes, they endeavour to get rid of uneasy sensations by trying to forget them, and by continued efforts to free themselves from them they stifle the best feelings of their nature, become morose and disqualify themselves from the performance of any good whatever; or they relieve themselves by the performance of what is vulgarly called charity; they give money, victuals, clothes, &c., and thus by encouraging idleness and extinguishing enterprise, increase the evils they would remove.⁹⁸

Bentham’s Chrestomathic school, like his Panopticon prison and National Charity Company, was never realized in any serious way, though Place and Wakefield engaged in heroic efforts to create a system of schools reflecting Bentham’s views. If his influence was clearly felt, it was at a higher level, with the construction of University College, London, which reflected his vision of opening up higher education to all, regardless of economic status, religious affiliation, race, gender, or political belief. This was perhaps an apt tribute, and corrective.

For arguably, it was Bentham’s obsession with what some would call the “social bases of self-respect” that led him to these conclusions, in his Panopticon, Poor Law, and Chrestomathic works, and in others as well. Achieving happiness was, on his view, extremely difficult for society as a whole. Most people must labor their way through poverty, and the indigent, uneducated, and vulnerable were going to have an especially tough time of it. It would take large scale efforts at social engineering (and effective public administration) to secure their basic necessities, and in doing so give them a stake in a system that otherwise they would have little reason to respect. Much of the country just was badly off, and kept down by ruling elites who had every perverse incentive to continue their predatory practices, masked in an obfuscatory fog about the ancient laws, and marked by corruption, delusion, fictions, and “factious honors.” It was not as though the truly disadvantaged had the opportunities to advance, or that such freedom of speech as existed meant much to those with no education or social resources to realize their freedom in any concrete fashion. Destitution and the death penalty awaited them, whether they were deserving or undeserving. As Crimmins has put it, in “contrast with the cesspits of the existing gaols and hulks, and the horrific experiment with the penal colony at Botany Bay, Bentham’s prisoners were to be kept clean and their labour made productive and profitable, and serve to develop skills that might be useful to them upon release and assist in their moral reformation.” Furthermore, once

the principles that gave shape to the panopticon and the various devices built into its management are understood, the arguments of critics who view it merely as a punitive and repressive institution are less impressive. Bentham did not devise the panopticon as a means of social control, but as a means of minimizing the cost to the public of establishments in which supervision was by definition a requirement. Moreover, his championing of ‘the inspection principle’ needs to be seen in the context of the development of inspection over the nineteenth century as a tool for the prevention of abuses in establishments like asylums and schools. It was eventually recognized that the legislation introduced by the Factory Acts to end the exploitation of the labour of children could not be properly enforced without a programme of work-place inspection by public officials, a practice universally accepted today in nearly every public place of activity in western societies.99

Similar points apply to Panopticism generally, which obviously could involve the use of one scheme, say, the National Charity Company, to help reduce the need for other schemes, say, the Panopticon prisons. And crucially, better educational institutions might help reduce the need for both poor houses and prisons, or at least so Bentham seemed to hope. How, it is only fair to ask, did he envision the potential of his tougher measures turning the times around, and rendering themselves less needful? Was the “ideal republic” of the future all that closely connected to the “ideal republic” of the present? Thomas Peardon, in a classic essay on “Bentham’s Ideal Republic,” argued that Bentham’s Constitutional Code (composed between 1820 and 1832) “may be regarded as Bentham’s view of the best possible commonwealth—a Utilitarian Utopia” and an essential piece of the Pannomion.¹⁰⁰ But even that work, as extensive as it is, mostly only captures a static, not an evolutionary, picture of Bentham’s reformism. Still, as Peardon notes:

Bentham was hopeful, too, that the influence of sympathy could be increased at the expense of self-regard by wisely contrived political arrangements. Even now, he further concedes, ‘In a highly matured state of society, in here and there a highly cultivated and expanded mind, under the stimulus of some extraordinary excitement, a sacrifice of self-regarding interest to social interest, upon a nation scale has not been without example.’¹⁰¹

True, “such a phenomenon is less frequent in occurrence than insanity,” and self-preference was by far the safer assumption, but even so, the competent public servants with an “aptitude” for the work would have that “moral aptitude” that involved “being in an adequate degree actuated and guided by the desire of securing to the greatest number in question, at all times, the greatest quantity, or say the maximum, of happiness.”¹⁰² More such fit public servants would be available as society progressed, and their work would of course be reinforced by publicity and enlightened public opinion, not to mention more artful architectural design, including crescent-shaped government houses that would facilitate the right forms of interaction.

At any rate, the overlap between Bentham’s various schemes is striking, and the peculiar details, taken together, can give a rather different, less uniformly disciplinary picture. Thus, in the discussion of education in Outline of Pauper Management Improved, Bentham at one point explains his “Talent-cultivation principle”:

Natural talents of any kind, manifesting themselves in an extra-ordinary degree, to receive appropriate culture. Examples:—Musical habits principally:—viz. an extraordinary fine voice, or an extraordinary good ear, and thence affection for the pursuit. (In the instance of a natural taste for the arts of design, or of strength or comeliness adapted to dancing, or other theatrical exhibitions, superiority is less manifest, culture is less exceptionable in the eyes of a sever moralist, and the object is of inferior account.)—Advantages:—Comfort and consideration of this part of the pauper community increased.—Importance and desirableness of the condition of a Company’s apprentice raised.—For the importance of music, as an assistant to instruction, intellectual, moral, and religious, see . …103

This is followed by a section on the “Fellow-instruction principle,” the same principle figuring in the Chrestomathic schools.

In material that was drafted, but not included in the text as it appeared, Bentham elaborated:

Subjects of instruction, principally such branches of knowledge or art, as exhibit the grounds and reasons of the several branches of economy carried on in the establishment: the general instruction applied all along to the particular processes actually employ’d—These branches are: 1. Reading. 2. Arithmetic (the two necessary inlets to all the rest). 3. Natural history in its several branches. 4. Chemistry. 5. Mechanicks, and 6. Geometry, Land-surveying included: all of them so far, and so far only, as is conducive to the above purpose. Applications of the theological cast will render these subordinate instructions the more suitable to the main purpose of the day. Prints, models or specimens, of the several subject-matters, according to their nature—implements of instruction, all of them addressing themselves to sense—might take place of the uninstructive imitations, toys, and playthings usually put into the hands of children. Imitations have their use, in as far as originals are inaccessible, or can not in equal numbers and for a constancy be subjected to one view. Instructions, such as can be convey’d either by letters or imitative representations, should be digested as much as may be into the form of Tables, printed on but one side of the paper, and matching, though not necessarily equal, in point of size.

Towards the close of the apprenticeship—that is at the approach of the period in which the individual will be committed to his own governance. 7. Of medical knowledge—(e.g., of the sciences explanatory of the structure, functions, and disorders of the human body) enough to give the rationale of a set of prophylactic instructions: instructions guarding against accidents, practices, and habits immediately or remotely productive of disease. 8. Medical knowledge more at large, as applied to domestic animals. 9. Of moral instruction, what may serve to explain the nature and the mischief of the several sorts of pernicious practices, which he will have been so little exposed either to fall into or to be a sufferer by, during his continuance in these seats of tranquility and innocence.

[10] Music—vocal, and in parts: a preparative to psalmody, a portion of the service of the day.

[11.] For males, say from 14 years of age, military exercise … [12] For both sexes, when the season permits, and if the situation affords the means, swimming:—taught as an art as well as practiced as a pastime:—to begin at the earliest ages at which it has been observed to be practiced among savages:—practised latterly with heavy cloaths on, as a lesson of security.

[13.] While those of military age are occupied on military exercise, those of inferior age might be exercised in running or leaping: to which might be added dancing, which is little more than walking, running and leaping in concert and in preconcerted figures—Should the sexes intermingle in the dance? 104

And there is greater elaboration still on the “[a]dvantages resulting or derivable from musical instruction,” music being “an immediate and constant fund of self-amusement,” an exercise “favourable to health,” an art “favourable to intellectual strength, by the gentle exercise it affords to the mind,” and “favourable to moral health, by filling up vacancies in the mind, and thereby blocking up the entrance against vitious ideas and desires.” It also “ministers naturally to the faculty of pleasing” and can even be “rendered subservient to productive industry, by giving regularity and quickness to the motions of the workman, and in works performed in concert, by disposing and enabling him to keep time—at any rate by cheering him during the work.” And of course, music is recognized as an aid to religion and military strength. Come to that, it “may be made subservient, in the way of communication and retention, to instruction of any kind, especially when conjoined with metre: —the multiplication-table, lately set to a pleasing melody, affords a happy instance of its application to instruction of the driest kind.”¹⁰⁵ And the list goes on and on.

This is not exactly the program of young Sissy Jupe, subjected to the suffocating schooling of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M’Choakumchild.¹⁰⁶ True, Bentham would discard “Languages, even living; much more dead: Grammar, even English: Mathematics, all the high and difficult branches: Astronomy, unless, in the maritime situations, so much of the practical part as is necessary to navigation: Geography; except so much as is attained by looking at a map: Poetry: Oratory: History: Logic.”¹⁰⁷ But somehow, the popular portraits of the dark satanic utilitarian mills of both industry and education leave out the part about everyone singing all the time, confident that they have their share of general respect, can perform productive labor, and have been given the “rudiments of all other intellectual improvements,” along with swimming lessons and more. In some cases, the National Charity Company houses would serve as “a seminary for the Choir and the Theatre.” And this is not to mention being indulged in the safer forms of sex.

The vision here would seem to import a good deal of the experience, positive and negative, that Bentham himself had when growing up. His enduring love of music and natural beauty shine through, as do his distaste for dead languages and dull instruction. The wonder is that he did not include Telemachus in the curriculum as he sought to codify his experiences for the benefit of the world. But the houses would nonetheless be schools of sympathy, not only via the musical cultivation of the inmates, but more broadly, among other things providing a network of lodgings and employment opportunities such that the “self-maintaining poor” might be allowed to maintain better social connections:

Travelling all over the country, wherever their occasions lead them;—setting out without money, and arriving with money in their pockets. At present this cannot be done, because there is nobody in a condition to give employment at such short warning, in large or small quantities, as it may happen, to persons unknown, coming in any number. A man, having money in his pocket, might work or not work, as he chose:—taking the benefit of the diet and lodging at the cheap price of the house, instead of using a public house, under the obligation of paying for expensive food and liquors. Domestic ties would be strengthened, and social affections cherished, by laying open, in this way, to the poor, those opportunities of occasional intercourse, and uninterrupted sympathy, which at present are monopolized by affluence.108

Even those who were not at liberty were, if well-behaved, to be allowed to go “to the industry-house nearest to the abode, of any of his near connections, whom he wishes to visit, though it were at the remotest part of South Britain.”

It is, however, intriguing that Bentham in these writings had his utilitarian scheme serving both the monarchy and religious practices, rather than disabusing people of them, though some later notes indicate that he was himself on the side of those who sought “the abolition of the monarchical part of the constitution.” The astounding, open radicalism of Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), Bentham’s Radical Reform Bill (1819), Church of England and its Catechism Examined (1818), Not Paul, but Jesus (1823), Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822), Emancipate Your Colonies! (1830), Indications respecting Lord Eldon (1825), etc., etc., is not to be found, at least openly, in the Panopticon or Poor Law writings, and it is difficult not to conclude that here, too, Bentham was advancing a very indirect form of utilitarianism, allowing that, e.g., some forms of religious belief and practice could be felicific under certain circumstances. Of course, it should also be recognized that he certainly allowed that in the role of legislator, considerations of time and place needed to be taken into account; given the relativity of custom, religion, morality, etc., sanctions needed to be tailored to the circumstances, and this despite his hopes for a Pannomion.109

But, although the going prejudices had to be accommodated and worked with to a degree, this did not mean that the utilitarian critique of them was stilled. The Panopticon and Poor Law writings do in fact dovetail in some surprising ways with even Bentham’s most radical later work, his amazing writings on sexuality, which, in combination with his attacks on religion, make Bertrand Russell look moderate by comparison. The angle on Bentham’s work needs to be wider still.

Very Useful Sex

Bentham made himself the spokesman of a silent and invisible minority. First, he rejects the silence taboo. ‘It seems rather too much,’ he remarks with dry irony, ‘to subscribe to men’s being hanged to save the indecency of enquiring whether they deserve it.’ Then … he pleads from a more rational mode of debate, which would scrutinize the purported social evils of forbidden sexual conduct rather than give rise to fervid rhetoric. … But, most of all, he insists that we should establish that an act really does cause social harm before we criminalize it.

—LOUIS CROMPTON, BYRON AND GREEK LOVE¹¹⁰

It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it have never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other.

—BENTHAM, “OFFENSES AGAINST ONE’S SELF”

Bentham apparently first began writing on matters of sex and sexuality in the mid-1780s as part of his work on a new penal code. In those writings, he was singularly compelling on both his familiar theme of consistency being the rarest of human traits, and various psychological factors that rarely receive much recognition as among his concerns—namely, the “hatred of pleasure and horror of singularity,” particularly the latter. He was, surprisingly to some, quite alert to issues of “difference.” And in his appreciation of same-sex love as a crucial part of the culture of the ancient Greeks, and the ways in which this undercut claims about its enervating or degenerative effects, he would not be seriously rivaled until John Addington Symonds circulated his pathbreaking “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” in 1867, though it might be added that, perceptive as he was of the cultural significance of, say, the Theban Sacred Band, Bentham did not capture all the fine points of Greek man-boy love in the way that Symonds did.¹¹¹

But his interest in these matters developed more fully and even more radically in the mid-1810s, when it was made part and parcel of his extensive critique of religion. The editors of his Of Sexual Irregularities and Other Writings on Sexual Morality explain:

In Bentham’s view, the condemnation of sexual practices other than that between one man and one woman, within marriage, for the procreation of children, and more particularly the severe punishment attached under English law to male same-sex relationships, were the products of an asceticism that had its root in the Mosaic law, but which had been incorporated into the Christian religion through the teachings of St Paul. Bentham’s purpose in ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’ was to show that Paul was an impostor, and that he had established his own religion which, in many important respects, including its attitude towards sexual morality and pleasure more generally, was not only distinct from, but opposed to, that of Jesus. Bentham argued that Paul had realized that he had much more to gain, in terms of power, money, and prestige, in abandoning his persecution of the followers of Jesus, and instead becoming their leader; or at least leader of the non-Jewish part of the movement. The essays in the present volume [“Of Sexual Irregularities—Or, Irregularities of the Sexual Appetite,” “Sextus,” and “General Idea of a Work, Having for One of Its Objects the Defence of the Principle of Utility, so Far as Concerns the Liberty of Taste, Against the Conjunct Hostility of the Principle of Asceticism and the Principle of Antipathy; and for Its Proposed Title, Proposed on the Ground of Expected Popularity, or at Least Protection Against Popular Rage,—Not Paul, But Jesus”] are more directly concerned with arguing that, according to the principle of utility, no consensual mode of sexual gratification should be condemned, but rather that the greatest happiness of the community would be promoted in the most effective way possible by the removal of sanctions—whether religious, political, or moral—from sexual activity, at least insofar as it was undertaken in private. In short, Bentham makes the utilitarian case for sexual liberty.112

“Sexual liberty” is putting it a bit too mildly. Bentham was in fact broad-minded to an extreme, as Schofield explains in the conclusion to a delightful short work on “Jeremy Bentham: Prophet of Secularism”:

If reason and consistency, in other words the principle of utility, rather than the principle of asceticism, were the guide, argued Bentham, the pleasures of the bed would be treated with the same ‘indifference’ as the pleasures of the table. Just as with the table, individuals were left free to choose not only the ‘crude material’ that they ate but ‘the mode of cooking, seasoning and serving up’, so with the bed they would be left free to choose: ‘with or without a partner—if with a partner, whether with a partner of the same species or with a partner of another species; if of the same species, whether of the correspondent and opposite sex or of the same sex: number of partners, two only or more than two’. In every instance, the ‘portions and parts of the body employed’ should be left to the free choice of the individuals concerned.113

Schofield is quoting from the Bentham manuscripts but one of many such classifications of the options that Bentham wanted to open up. In his work “Sextus,” there is a marginal summary that allows “Parties two: one dead” and “Parties two: one not susceptible of life.” Another classification in that work considers whether the act involves rape (which is not allowed) or whether the parties are “united in the artificial and pneumatic bonds of the matrimonial contract” (which Bentham held should not be a lifelong contract).¹¹⁴ But, rape apart, a simple consistency on humanity’s part would treat such choices as free differences of taste, like a taste for chocolate over vanilla. Unfortunately, Bentham does not appear to allow, in this context, that such choices ought to be even freer than choices among foods, given the pains involved in food production processes harming nonhuman animals.

Now, as for the religious intolerance of such liberty, the culprit, on Bentham’s reading, is clearly Paul. Paul is charged with having imported asceticism and sexual conformity into Christianity (religion being termed by Bentham the “juggernaut”). In Bentham’s words, on “this whole field, on which Moses legislates with such diversified minuteness, such impassioned asperity and such unrelenting rigour, Jesus is altogether silent. Jesus, from whose lips not a syllable favourable to ascetic self-denial is, by any one of his biographers, represented as having ever issued. Jesus who, among his disciples, had one to whom he imparted his authority and another in whose bosom his head reclined, and for whom he avowed his love: Jesus who, in the stripling clad in loose attire, found a still faithful adherent, after the rest of them had fled; Jesus, on the whole field of sexual irregularity, preserved an uninterrupted silence.”¹¹⁵

This line of Benthamism is probably nearly as shocking to many religious sensibilities today as it was when he first set it out. Talk of the “unnatural” is, for Bentham, as empty as talk of natural rights, and scarce “a practice can be named to which, upon the occasion of any condemnation passed upon it, this adjunct has not been applied.” The condemnation of sexual pleasures largely reduces to envy and antipathy, when a man witnesses “the contemplation of an enjoyment of which it is out of his power to be a partaker,” and to asceticism, when a man without recompense to himself or others “subjects himself to pain in any shape, considered as pain, or avoids receiving pleasure in any shape, considered as pleasure.”¹¹⁶ Contrary to any account of Bentham as an egoist, holding that humans just do, as a matter of fact, always seek to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain, it is clear that he saw humanity as all too given to the faults of antipathy and asceticism, which needed to be the focus of an all-out assault. This he announced at the beginning of “General Idea”:

The work has for its general object the good of mankind: the greatest happiness of the greatest number:—leading motive of the author, sympathy for the whole human race: this public and social motive, mixt with as little of personal interest as it is possible for it to be mixt with.

In pursuit of this all-comprehensive object, the work has attached itself to two particular objects, in themselves as unconnected with each other as any two can be, but connected by accident. These are—the reclaiming the public mind, 1. From the errors into which it has been led by the principle of asceticism; 2. from the gloomy and antisocial—and, in proportion as they are gloomy and antisocial, pernicious—notions, involved in the Calvinistic and various other modes of the religion of Jesus, and the antipathies that have sprung out of them.117

But it is very intriguing that Bentham devotes so much energy, not to dismissing religion in toto (though he comes close to that), but to co-opting the founding figure of Christianity, recruiting Jesus for the battle against antipathy and asceticism. There is undoubtedly an element of indirect, even esoteric utilitarian morality at work here, given Bentham’s evident hostility to anything smacking of the supernatural and his perfect insouciance in the face of possible non survival in any form of physical death—he in fact had trouble envisioning an afterlife as anything capable of generating happiness, given the absence of the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. But according to Schofield, “the precise nature” of Bentham’s skepticism is difficult to make out. “Many have concluded that Bentham must have been an atheist, but there is no direct evidence for this view, in that he refused, as a matter of principle, to express his personal religious views.”¹¹⁸ Apparently, not everything was to be subject to the transparency of the all-seeing eye.

At any rate, the upshot is that in the main religion is among the worst anti-utilitarian forces, and this is in significant measure because of its treatment of sex and sexuality. But what is more, religion is also one of the chief corruptors of education, and much of the need for reform in that area stems from the need to overthrow the force of established religion, which has, in its educational capacities, failed the poor: “Exclusion, and compulsory or seductive proselytism,—exclusion of one part of the community of the poor from the benefits of education—compelling the other part to come within the pale of the church dominion,—such are the two intimately connected, though perfectly distinct, and even contrasted, objects, in the pursuit of which this formulary is made the principle instrument.”¹¹⁹ Bentham had even intended his Church-of-Englandism work to be a continuation of his Chrestomathia, since its main target “was the system of education sponsored by the Church, and more particularly the schools of the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the National Church. The National Society had been founded in 1811 to promote the teaching of the doctrine of the Church of England by means of the ‘monitorial’ system of education . …” But this, of course, was regarded by Bentham as a complete perversion, an appropriation of effective educational techniques to teach preposterous lies through the use of the Catechism, the Bible itself being too subversive (given the utilitarian tendencies of Jesus). Thus:

Destitute of intellectual instruction, man, even in the bosom of the most civilized country, is often found appearing in no better a character than that of a savage. Of the Hulks, and the Penal Colonies—not to speak of the home Prisons—the population is, for the most part, composed of human beings thus abandoned to ignorance, vice, and wretchedness. Such, as to the far greater part, appears to be the state of the population under the Church of England.120

The system excluded many and corrupted many, wounding by both stigma and indoctrination. The wounds of Bentham’s forced Subscription, when at Oxford, had festered rather than healed, and if Church-of-Englandism belongs with Chrestomathia as his case for education reform, it also belongs with the Plan of Parliamentary Reform and Constitutional Code, as another component in his damning indictment of the whole mass of corruption represented by the Establishment. If happiness were to be effectively promoted, in Bentham’s view, the mass of humanity needed to be able to think critically, and his schemes, not the Establishment’s, held out that promise.

Indeed, in one of his most uncompromising works, The Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, which was expertly assembled and edited by George Grote and published under the pseudonym Phillip Beauchamp, Bentham remorselessly exposed the whole, vast range of religion’s ill effects:

Now religion has been shewn to create a number of factitious antipathies—that is, to make men hate a number of practices which they would not have hated had their views been confined simply to the present life. But if men would not naturally have hated these practices, this is a proof that they are not actually hurtful. Religion, therefore, attaches the hatred of mankind to actions not really injurious to them, and thus seduces it from its only legitimate and valuable function, that of deterring individuals from injurious conduct.¹²¹

And thanks to religion,

the science of morality has been enveloped in a cloud of perplexity and confusion. Philosophers profess, by means of this science, to interpret and to reconcile the various applications of approving and disapproving terms. But the practices on which the same epithet of approbation is bestowed, appear so incurably opposite, that it has been found impossible to reduce them to one common principle, or to discover any constituent quality which universally attracts either praise or blame. The intellect has been completely bewildered and baffled in all attempts to explain the foundation of morality, or to find any unerring fingerpost amidst a variety of diverging paths.122

As if that were not enough, there is with religion the “noxious” “coincidence and league with the sinister interests of earth—a coincidence so entire, as to secure unity of design on the part of both, without any necessity for special confederation. … Prostration and plunder of the community is indeed the common end of both.” That is,

[t]he aristocracy, for instance, possess the disposal of a mass of physical force sufficient to crush any partial resistance, and demand only to be secured against any very general or simultaneous opposition on the part of the community. To make this sure, they are obliged to maintain a strong purchase upon the public mind, and to chain it down to the level of submission—to plant within it feelings which may neutralize all hatred of slavery, and facilitate the business of spoliation. For this purpose the sacerdotal class are most precisely and most happily cut out. By their influence over the moral sentiments, they place implicit submission among the first of all human duties. They infuse the deepest reverence for temporal power, by considering the existing authorities as established and consecrated by the immaterial Autocrat above, and as identified with his divine majesty. The duty of mankind towards the earthly government becomes thus the same as duty to God—that is, an unvarying ‘prostration both of the understanding and will.’ Besides this direct debasement of the moral faculties for the purpose of assuring non-resistance, the supernatural terrors, and the extra-experimental belief, which the priest-hood are so industrious in diffusing, all tend to the very same result. They produce that mistrust, alarm, and insecurity, which disposes a man to bless himself in any little fragment of present enjoyment, while it stifles all aspirations for future improvement and even all ideas of its practicability.¹²³

That Bentham could engage in such sustained ideology critique, blasting religion as something rather worse than Marx’s “opiate of the masses,” and could do so in a way that recognized that no overt “conspiracy” was needed among the ruling elites, given social structural conditions, is a point that cannot be underscored boldly enough. His acute, perceptive account of how the connective tissue of the superstructural institutions of the ruling elites extended across education, religion, morality, law, economics, and more, and involved the systemic effects of mystification and depredation (including the libidinal costs), makes him sound more like a forerunner of Herbert Marcuse than a “leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century.” Simply put, for Bentham, the indigent poor (and many others) are cut off from genuine educational opportunity, brainwashed, exploited, and terrorized out of the best forms of happiness readily available to them. He, by contrast, would supply them with the true necessities and the fundamental critical ability to see through their oppressors, even throwing in the means of contraception and sex toys of his own design, albeit with a gentle warning that masturbation was too addictive and might keep one from enjoying sex with others. The rooting out of pernicious religious influences, partly with the help of Jesus, would open the way for democratic reforms ushering in a sexually liberated society that might actually be able to justify its inequalities in the name of happiness. It would in any event have to take seriously, with regard to public policies, another of Bentham’s notions—namely, diminishing marginal utility, such that an additional dollar or resource to a poor person represents a much greater increment in happiness than an additional dollar or resource to a member of the ruling elites. As the Plan of Parliamentary Reform had it, “all inequality is a source of evil”—the only defensible baseline for applying the utilitarian standard is complete equality, not the status quo. The burden of proof was on the ruling elites, and they would drop under the weight of it. Humanity made more consistent would be humanity made happier and more egalitarian.

On this score, Rosen has forcefully argued, for Bentham:

If one is a legislator and one’s task is to promote happiness in the public sphere, one’s concern is not with the perceptions and aggregations of private pleasure, but with the extension of pleasure throughout society. Hence, in its public sense, which is the sense in which Bentham mainly employed it, the principle of utility is concerned with the distribution of happiness and the extent of that distribution.124

Maximizing happiness, to Bentham’s mind, was like maximizing aptitude among government officials, a task that has distribution built into it, as an effort to extend administrative competence throughout the system. Given social realities, one cannot do this by creating an “aptitude monster,” but only by enhancing the aptitude of officials throughout the system. Indeed, for Rosen, “Bentham believed that equality was also a substantive principle to be approximated as closely as possible. Hence, in saying that equal amounts of happiness should be extended to all, he was referring to an equal or near equal outcome.”¹²⁵

Needless to say, this interpretation is simply not a stereotypically Dickensian or Marxian or Foucauldian take on Bentham, nor is it in keeping with many of the less provocative, more or less popular accounts of the Benthamite legacy. But the key words are Bentham’s own, supported, of course, by his life.

Taken together, the various reflections on Bentham in this chapter might well stimulate many further questions: what were his deepest religious beliefs? What did he really think of those who called themselves his disciples? Did he himself ever practice what he (privately) preached about harmless pleasures and same-sex activities? How, in the end, would he have presented his true priorities, had he been able to do so in an uncensored and perfectly candid way? How, had he been placed in a position of sovereign power, would he have acted? What form of education would he have wanted for his own children (or for John Stuart Mill, had he had him completely in his care)? How would he have depicted the happiest possible life? What degree of perfectibility did he allow, for future humanity? How many people, by his reckoning, could find their selfish impulses satisfied by pursuing the greatest happiness, under better social circumstances? How much overlap could there be, between his views and Godwin’s?

Some of these questions may receive better answers as the transcription project continues. Some may remain mysteries forever. But when it comes to what one is tempted to call his critical theory of happiness, it seems possible to formulate some plausible Benthamite responses.

Radical Hedonism

If such was Bentham’s vision in the large, could his hedonistic account of happiness and defense of the principle of utility really support it? That may be one of the most fundamental questions, an answer to which might render all the other questions more tractable.

Thus, against a slew of critics who have charged him with incoherently conflating psychological egoism (that people do by nature always seek their own maximal happiness) with the principle of utilitarianism, which calls for promoting the happiness of all, the obvious answer is that it is of course possible for people to find their best interest in serving the interest of all, just as Bentham himself did. More broadly, however, his point is less that such benevolence is impossible—it clearly is not—but that the end of benevolence, the general happiness, is better served by a more indirect approach that relies on narrower and more familiar forms of self-interest, whether this be by the invisible hand of the market or the visible hand of Panoptical institutions and government, the sanctions and incentives artfully arranged. Consider that

[t]he interest which a member of the community at large, has in the populousness of the community at large, is as nothing, in comparison of the interest thus created; viz. on the part of a member of the company, and still more on the part of an officer of a company’s industry-house. This is the only shape which genuine and efficient humanity can take. The notion, which insists upon disinter[est]edness (i.e. the absence of the species of motive most to be depended upon) as an indispensable qualification, or even though it were but a recommendation, in the instance of a person bearing a part in the management of such a concern, is a notion respectable in its source, but the most prejudicial in its tendency of any that can be imagined.—Every system of management which has disinter[est]edness, pretended or real, for its foundation, is rotten at the root, susceptible of a momentary prosperity at the outset, but sure to perish at the long run. That principle of action is most to be depended upon, whose influence is most powerful, most constant, most uniform, most lasting, and most general among mankind. Personal interest is that principle: a system of economy built on any other foundation, is built upon a quicksand.126

There is no doubt an economistic bent here, but it is less dogmatic a priori psychology than open empirical investigation into when and where which sanctions work. With sanctions, there are both “the thunders of the law” and “the whispers of simple morality,” and for Bentham, if the former “prove impotent” it is silly to expect the latter to be influential. But all sanctions, these and others having to do with religion and politics, should be effectively arranged the better to achieve the utilitarian end, rendering the achievement of that end as easy as possible by recognizing that each person is often the best judge of his or her happiness and will, by effectively pursuing that happiness under the right system, in effect be advancing the utilitarian end. Still, as H.L.A. Hart carefully noted, there are some passages where Bentham “seems to treat private ethics as a moral standard requiring the maximization of the general welfare, as if it were simply the principle of utility in its application to the conduct of individuals backed by informal moral pressures.” Thus, “Bentham says the question whether to obey bad legislation is a question that ‘belongs exclusively to private ethics’ and here plainly treats the principle of utility not the pursuit of personal interest as ‘guiding a man through these straits.’ There are in addition many references to private ethics as concerned to ‘prevent’ and ‘censure’ pernicious acts where legal punishment would be inappropriate . …”¹²⁷

Hart claims that Bentham may be guilty of some unclarity or inconsistency in the way he puts these matters. But even if that is so, the picture that emerges seems a perfectly familiar indirect or two-level utilitarian one, with the utilitarian standard only being directly deployed as a decision procedure in special circumstances where reliance on other decision procedures will not have the appropriate felicific effect. The question, as with Godwin, is in large part an empirical one, asking just where and when such a critical utilitarian consciousness should kick in and how the needed motives can be made available and institutions rendered as supportive as possible. From the larger perspective of the legislator or moralist, of course, each is to count as one, no one for more than one, as in Bentham’s design of the system. But there is no denying that sometimes one must take that point of view in private morality, and the system as a whole should educate and socialize in a way that cultivates the sympathy needed to do so, which is the more necessary given the degree to which utilitarian tendencies remain unconscious and corrupted in so many people:

By the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of their lives men in general embrace this principle, without thinking of it: if not for the ordering of their own actions, yet for the trying of their own actions, as well as of those of other men. There have been, at the same time, not many, perhaps, even of the most intelligent, who have been disposed to embrace it purely and without reserve. There are even few who have not taken some occasion or other to quarrel with it, either on account of their not understanding always how to apply it or on account of some prejudice or other which they were afraid to examine into, or could not bear to part with. For such is the stuff that man is made of: in principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.128

This verdict on the human frame was one of Bentham’s favorite and most consistent themes, and in virtually all of his works he poses the puzzle of just how rational his maximizers really are. Human beings are inconsistent, and curiously defective in that telescopic faculty needed for long-term prudence, as the failure of religious sanctions invoking an afterlife so often demonstrates: “mere remoteness practically annuls the most dreadful of all expectations, without insinuating even the most transient suspicion of ultimate escape. But if distance alone will produce so striking a deduction, how much will its negative effect be heightened, when coupled with uncertainty as to the eventful fulfillment?”¹²⁹ Religion aggravates these problems, positively inducing mental disarray and worse. “Fear is the never-failing companion and offspring of ignorance, and the circumstances of human life infallibly give birth to such a communion.” There is only one ultimate remedy: “It is only to knowledge that we owe our respite from perpetual suffering; wherever our knowledge fails us and we are reduced to a state of unprotected helplessness, all our sense of security, all anticipations of future ease, must vanish along with it.”¹³⁰ Knowledge could be very useful indeed.

But Bentham’s own consistency was notable, despite many claims to the contrary. Thus, there is no “naturalistic fallacy” or conflation of “ought” and “is” embedded in his account, no misguided attempt at persuasive definition such as might build utilitarianism into the descriptive meaning of the very terms “good,” “right,” etc., despite the oft-repeated charge that Bentham was conspicuously guilty of such maneuvers. Again, as Hart has observed:

It is I think impossible to believe that Bentham, who as I have said is so alive to the ‘eulogistic’ or approval-expressing functions of language even when it is concealed and who elsewhere expressly says of the word ‘ought’ that it is used to convey the speaker’s approval, could have regarded the words ‘good’, ‘right’ and ‘ought’ as merely having the descriptive meaning which the suggested proof requires. Throughout his work Bentham constantly uses these terms to express approval and to commend actions or legislation and expressly states that considerations of utility are the reasons why actions ‘ought’ to be done or why it is ‘right’ to do them. His statement … that these terms only have a meaning when used of actions conformable to the principle of utility is I think intended to convey an idea which is central to his whole argument, namely that when so used they raise a rationally settleable issue because only then do they invoke an external standard which reasonable men would accept for the determination of right and wrong. In systems which do not invoke any external standard such expressions remain mere expressions of personal taste and this, as Bentham says … makes them ‘sounds instead of sense’, ‘caprice instead of reason’ … or, as he similarly says elsewhere of the expression ‘a right’, when it is divorced from the notion of a law which determines the criteria for its application, such terms become ‘mere sounds to dispute about’.131

Bentham may have been mistaken in believing that the standard of utility was the only such option, but it is uncharitable in the extreme to claim that he did not grasp the normative side of what he was doing as exactly that—normative.

Finally, on Bentham’s much maligned hedonism, which has obviously done much of the heavy-lifting in his vision, it would seem that the architect of pleasure had, as we have seen, more concrete particulars in mind than the famous but very abstract account in An Introduction suggests. Still, that account is, of course, to be taken seriously, and it is more suggestive than it may seem. When considering the individual, taken as such, Bentham breaks pleasure and pain down according to its intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, and purity. When considering a number of persons, he adds to this list “extension,” or how far the pleasures/pains extend to others. The whole account is captured in a famous mnemonic ditty that Bentham composed not long after the first edition of An Introduction:

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—

Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure,

Such pleasures seek, if private be thy end:

If it be public, wide let them extend.

Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:

If pains must come, let them extend to few.¹³²

As the following chapters will demonstrate, some such form of hedonism remains an open option, an ongoing research project for explicating the notion of well-being or ultimate good. Considerable reconstruction will be needed, however, to free it from unhelpful distortions, such as a contestable distinction between subjective and. objective and other problematic notions.133 And of course, as much of this chapter has shown, although Bentham no doubt held that practical reason required the calculation of the pleasures and pains likely to result from actions, rules, institutions, etc., the practical exigencies of law and policy necessitated regular reliance on the more indirect resources of money, security, medical care, education, etc., with their links to pleasure/pain being largely a contingent, empirical matter. He toyed with many possible metrics on this score, and was acutely aware of the difficulties presented by all of them.

But for purposes of concluding this chapter, it is sufficient to emphasize again that, as robust as his conception of the pleasures of the board and the bed may have been, Bentham in fact spelled out a very complex picture of human happiness, allowing that the “several simple pleasures of which human nature is susceptible, seem to be as follows:”

1. The pleasures of sense. 2. The pleasures of wealth. 3. The pleasures of skill. 4. The pleasures of amity. 5. The pleasures of a good name. 6. The pleasures of power. 7. The pleasures of piety. 8. The pleasures of benevolence. 9. The pleasures of malevolence. 10. The pleasures of memory. 11. The pleasures of imagination. 12. The pleasures of expectation. 13. The pleasures dependent on association. 14. The pleasures of relief.

Each is in turn broken down into many elements with the pleasures of sense, for example, including:

1. The pleasures of the taste or palate; including whatever pleasures are experienced in satisfying the appetites of hunger and thirst. 2. The pleasure of intoxication. 3. The pleasures of the organ of smelling. 4. The pleasures of the touch. 5. The simple pleasures of the ear; independent of association. 6. The simple pleasures of the eye; independent of association. 7. The pleasure of the sexual sense. 8. The pleasure of health: or, the internal pleasurable feeling or flow of spirits (as it is called,) which accompanies a state of full health and vigour; especially at times of moderate bodily exertion. 9. The pleasures of novelty: or, the pleasures derived from the gratification of the appetite of curiosity, by the application of new objects to any of the senses.¹³⁴

Needless to say, there is much further refined classification, and a strong emphasis on how susceptibility to these pleasures and pains differs according to circumstances, with sentient creatures ranging widely in sensibility. In fact, although Bentham often retained the language of simple sensation in his descriptions of pleasures and pains, he advanced far beyond any such reductionistic account and recognized how, in Quinn’s words, agents are forever “interpreting the world with the tools made available to them by their particular language, and by the habitual ways in which they put that language together, in a constructivist arena where dominant discourses assert the salience of some connections, and the non-existence or irrelevance of others.” Crucially, as Quinn has stressed, the

socially mediated nature of the vast majority of Bentham’s simple pleasures and pains emerges very clearly when we ask how many of them depend upon the agent’s beliefs about the affective attitudes of other sentient beings. At a conservative estimate, the pleasures and pains of amity, good name and piety depend absolutely on my belief about the degree to which others love me or hate me. In addition, the pleasure of power depends on my belief that I can modify the behaviour of others in accordance with my will. The extent to which Bentham’s enumeration contains pains and pleasures which depend crucially not only upon expectations of future contingencies, but on the agent’s beliefs about the affective attitudes of others gives the lie to the reductionist critique which views his treatment as a monstrous simplification of complex psychological processes.135

Taking people as they are, one must recognize the full range of pleasures and pains, if only to grasp how the felicific calculus is to work and the difficulties of making it work at all. Bentham was, far more than is commonly recognized, akin to Sidgwick in his belief that although there is no better alternative to the felicific calculus, that “calculus” is riddled with problems, rendering it very rough and uncertain. Clearly, as Crimmins has noted, Bentham was anything but naïve about how challenging this task really was, and may have anticipated Mill as well:

Clearly, Bentham was aware of the limitations of the mathematical approach to summing pleasures and pains. As recent scholars have noted, his classification of pleasures included qualitative distinctions not amenable to strict calculation. It is impossible, for example, to quantify the intensity or purity of a pleasure. On the other hand, it is entirely feasible for an individual to determine that one pleasure in more intense or purer than another he has experienced and to quantify multiple qualities of pleasures, though Bentham understood that such ‘calculations’ were more impressionistic than mathematical. … Viewed in this light, the distance between Bentham and the supposed ‘revisionism’ of Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures is sharply reduced.¹³⁶

But in determining just how “high” the Benthamite pleasures could or should go, and how that might bear on his more visionary claims for the progress of humanity, it might at this point be best to bring Bentham into comparison with the younger Mill, who did so much to remake utilitarianism in his own image.