Jeremy Bentham
| |
|---|---|
Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill
| |
| Born | 15 February 1748 |
| Died | 6 June 1832 (aged 84)
London, England, United Kingdom
|
| Education | The Queen's College, Oxford (BA 1763; MA 1766) |
| Era | 18th-century philosophy 19th-century philosophy |
| School | Utilitarianism, legal positivism, liberalism |
Main interests
| Political philosophy, philosophy of law, ethics, economics |
Notable ideas
| Greatest happiness principle |
| Signature | |
 | |
Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.
Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, of the death penalty, and of physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favor of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts". Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.
Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism. He "had considerable influence on the reform of prisons, schools, poor laws, law courts, and Parliament itself."
On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favor of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.
Life
Portrait of Bentham by the studio of Thomas Frye, 1760–1762
Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, to a wealthy family that supported the Tory party.
He was reportedly a child prodigy: he was found as a toddler sitting at
his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he
began to study Latin at the age of three. He learnt to play the violin and at the age of seven, Bentham would perform sonatas by Handel during dinner parties. He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham, with whom he was close.
He attended Westminster School and, in 1760, at age 12, was sent by his father to The Queen's College, Oxford,
where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1763 and his master's
degree in 1766. He trained as a lawyer and, though he never practised,
was called to the bar in 1769. He became deeply frustrated with the complexity of the English legal code, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane".
When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence
in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official
response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer
John Lind to publish a rebuttal.
His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an
essay titled "Short Review of the Declaration" written by Bentham, a
friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans' political
philosophy.
Among his many proposals for legal and social reform was a design for a prison building he called the Panopticon.
He spent some sixteen years of his life developing and refining his
ideas for the building and hoped that the government would adopt the
plan for a National Penitentiary appointing him as contractor-governor.
Although the prison was never built, the concept had an important
influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French
philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions.
Bentham became convinced that his plans for the Panopticon had
been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite acting in their own
interests. It was largely because of his brooding sense of injustice
that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest"—that is, of the
vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public
interest—which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.
More successful was his cooperation with Patrick Colquhoun in tackling the corruption in the Pool of London. This resulted in the Thames Police Bill of 1798, which was passed in 1800. The bill created the Thames River Police, which was the first preventive police force in the country and was a precedent for Robert Peel's reforms 30 years later.
Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. In
the 1780s, for example, Bentham maintained a correspondence with the
aging Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be allowed to freely float. As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France. He was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence arose after the Jacobins took power (1792). Between 1808 and 1810, he held a personal friendship with Latin American Independence Precursor Francisco de Miranda and paid visits to Miranda's Grafton Way house in London.
In 1823, he co-founded The Westminster Review with James Mill as a journal for the "Philosophical Radicals"—a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted considerable influence in British public life. One was John Bowring, to whom Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of The Westminster Review and eventually his literary executor. Another was Edwin Chadwick, who wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law Amendment Act: Bentham employed Chadwick as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.
An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe's The Life of John Stuart Mill:
During his youthful visits to Bowood House, the country seat of his patron Lord Lansdowne, he had passed his time at falling unsuccessfully in love with all the ladies of the house, whom he courted with a clumsy jocularity, while playing chess with them or giving them lessons on the harpsichord. Hopeful to the last, at the age of eighty he wrote again to one of them, recalling to her memory the far-off days when she had "presented him, in ceremony, with the flower in the green lane" [citing Bentham's memoirs]. To the end of his life he could not hear of Bowood without tears swimming in his eyes, and he was forced to exclaim, "Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future—do not let me go back to the past."
A psychobiographical study by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran argues that he may have had Asperger's syndrome.
Bentham was an atheist. González 2012,
p. 81 writes, "In sum, with Hume's agnosticism and Bentham's atheism,
the fundamental voluntarist thesis about the gulf between the divine and
the human mind reaches new depths, and this serves to reinforce and
radicalize the rejection, begun by Pufendorf, of Grotian rights-theory
as the appropriate means of formulating the conventionalist theory of
the moral life." And Crimmins 1990,
p. 283 notes, "Making allowance for Adams's cautious phrasing, this is a
concise statement of Bentham's secular positivism, but it is also
important to note the conviction with which Bentham held his atheism."
Death and the auto-icon
Bentham's Public dissection
Bentham's auto-icon
Jeremy Bentham's severed head, on temporary display at UCL
Bentham died on 6 June 1832 aged 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London, England. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection
of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early
as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body
for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham. A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.
On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were
distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3
p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains
in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.
Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a
wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with
hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith, it was acquired by University College London
in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South
Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th
and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".
Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified
to resemble its appearance in life. Southwood Smith's experimental
efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of
New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over
sulfuric acid and drawing off the fluids, although technically
successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and
darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. The auto-icon was therefore given a wax
head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was
displayed in the same case as the auto-icon for many years, but became
the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.
In 2017, plans were announced to re-exhibit the head and at the
same time obtain a DNA sample for sequencing with the goal of
identifying genetic evidence of autism.
In 2018, Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon was on display in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Breuer location.
Work
Utilitarianism
Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian
code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but
also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be
based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its "fundamental axiom", it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley,
although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was
in the form "the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority
of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing
relating to that state must finally be determined".
The "greatest happiness principle",
or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all Bentham's
thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over
"pain". He wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ...
Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.
Bentham was a determined opponent of religion. Crimmins observes:
"Between 1809 and 1823 Jeremy Bentham carried out an exhaustive
examination of religion with the declared aim of extirpating religious
beliefs, even the idea of religion itself, from the minds of men."
Bentham suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the Hedonistic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student John Stuart Mill.
Mill sharply criticized Bentham's view of human nature, which failed to
recognize conscience as a human motive. Mill considered Bentham's view
"to have done and to be doing very serious evil." In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.
Bentham's critics have claimed that he undermined the foundation of a free society by rejecting natural rights.
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote "The principle of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number was as inimical to the idea of liberty
as to the idea of rights."
In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a
classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures, by which we might test the
"happiness factor" of any action. Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked that Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J. J. C. Smart), unlike Mill's, is often criticised for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In Bentham and the Common Law Tradition,
Gerald J. Postema states: "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham's
hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis
of the notion..." Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture
one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people
outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. However, as P.
J. Kelly argued in Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law,
Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences.
According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of
social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability
within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of
well-being".
It provides security, a precondition for the formation of expectations.
As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much higher
than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favor the
sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many. Law professor Alan
Dershowitz has quoted Bentham to argue that torture should sometimes be
permitted.
Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of morality ties
into legislative practices. His principle of utility regards "good" as
that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum
amount of pain and "evil" as that which produces the most pain without
the pleasure. This concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as
physical as well as spiritual. Bentham writes about this principle as
it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down a
set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a
certain decision will create.
The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity,
duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent.
Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when
it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more
pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to
determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offense. Instead
of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that certain unnecessary
laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous
vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon
legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any
legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for
the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual
pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared
"right", because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater
pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the
legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and
the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.
Economics
Defence of Usury, 1788
Bentham's opinions about monetary economics were completely different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Henry Thornton. He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume,
the saving-investment relationship, and other matters that form the
content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was
close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian
decision making. His work is considered to be an early precursor of
modern welfare economics.
Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according
to their value or "dimension" such as intensity, duration, certainty of a
pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of
pleasures and pains; and they set a precedent for the future employment
of the maximization principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm
and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.
Bentham advocated "Pauper Management" which involved the creation of a chain of large workhouses.
Law reform
Bentham was the first person to aggressively advocate for the codification of all of the common law
into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined
the verb "to codify" to refer to the process of drafting a legal code.
He lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both
England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison
in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young
country. After he learned more about American law and realized that most
of it was state-based, he promptly wrote to the governors of every
single state with the same offer.
During his lifetime, Bentham's codification efforts were
completely unsuccessful. Even today, they have been completely rejected
by almost every common law jurisdiction, including England. However, his
writings on the subject laid the foundation for the moderately
successful codification work of David Dudley Field II in the United States a generation later.
Animal rights
Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights.
He argued and believed that the ability to suffer, not the ability to
reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the "insuperable
line". If reason alone were the criterion by which we judge who ought to
have rights, human infants and adults with certain forms of disability
might fall short, too. In 1789, alluding to the limited degree of legal protection afforded to slaves in the French West Indies by the Code Noir, he wrote:
The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Earlier in that paragraph, Bentham makes clear that he accepted that
animals could be killed for food, or in defence of human life, provided
that the animal was not made to suffer unnecessarily. Bentham did not
object to medical experiments
on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular
goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving
that goal. He wrote that otherwise he had a "decided and insuperable
objection" to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful
effects such practices might have on human beings. In a letter to the
editor of the Morning Chronicle in March 1825, he wrote:
I never have seen, nor ever can see, any objection to the putting of dogs and other inferior animals to pain, in the way of medical experiment, when that experiment has a determinate object, beneficial to mankind, accompanied with a fair prospect of the accomplishment of it. But I have a decided and insuperable objection to the putting of them to pain without any such view. To my apprehension, every act by which, without prospect of preponderant good, pain is knowingly and willingly produced in any being whatsoever, is an act of cruelty; and, like other bad habits, the more the correspondent habit is indulged in, the stronger it grows, and the more frequently productive of its bad fruit. I am unable to comprehend how it should be, that to him to whom it is a matter of amusement to see a dog or a horse suffer, it should not be matter of like amusement to see a man suffer; seeing, as I do, how much more morality as well as intelligence, an adult quadruped of those and many other species has in him, than any biped has for some months after he has been brought into existence; nor does it appear to me how it should be, that a person to whom the production of pain, either in the one or in the other instance, is a source of amusement, would scruple to give himself that amusement when he could do so under an assurance of impunity.
Gender and sexuality
Bentham
said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position
that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist. Bentham spoke for a complete equality between sexes.
Bentham
nevertheless thought women inferior to men regarding such qualities as
"strength of intellectual powers" and "firmness of mind".
The essay Offences Against One's Self, argued for the liberalization of laws prohibiting homosexual sex.
The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of
offending public morality. It was published for the first time in 1931.
Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing
them merely as "irregularities of the venereal appetite". The essay
chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response
to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offense—public
displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the
essay was published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1978, the "Abstract" stated that Bentham's essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England".
Privacy
For
Bentham, transparency had moral value. For example, journalism puts
power-holders under moral scrutiny. However, Bentham wanted such
transparency to apply to everyone. This he describes by picturing the
world as a gymnasium in which each "gesture, every turn of limb or
feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general
happiness, will be noticed and marked down".
He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of
generating understanding and improvements for people's lives.
Fictional entities
Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories, such as nature, custom, or the social contract.
Bentham and University College London
Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University (the institution that, in 1836, became University College London),
though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only
an indirect role in its establishment. His direct involvement was
limited to his buying a single £100 share in the new University, making
him just one of over a thousand shareholders.
Henry Tonks' imaginary scene of Bentham approving the building plans of London University
Bentham and his ideas can nonetheless be seen as having inspired
several of the actual founders of the University. He strongly believed
that education should be more widely available, particularly to those
who were not wealthy or who did not belong to the established church; in
Bentham's time, membership of the Church of England and the capacity to bear considerable expenses were required of students entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the University of London was the first in England to admit all, regardless of race,
creed or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's
vision. There is some evidence that, from the sidelines, he played a
"more than passive part" in the planning discussions for the new
institution, although it is also apparent that "his interest was greater
than his influence". He failed in his efforts to see his disciple John Bowring appointed professor of English or History, but he did oversee the appointment of another pupil, John Austin, as the first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.
The more direct associations between Bentham and UCL—the
College's custody of his Auto-icon (see above) and of the majority of
his surviving papers—postdate his death by some years: the papers were
donated in 1849, and the Auto-icon in 1850. A large painting by Henry Tonks hanging in UCL's Flaxman Gallery
depicts Bentham approving the plans of the new university, but it was
executed in 1922 and the scene is entirely imaginary. Since 1959 (when
the Bentham Committee was first established) UCL has hosted the Bentham
Project, which is progressively publishing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.
UCL now endeavours to acknowledge Bentham's influence on its
foundation, while avoiding any suggestion of direct involvement, by
describing him as its "spiritual founder".
Bibliography
.jpg)
The back of No. 19, York Street (1848). In 1651 John Milton moved into a "pretty garden-house" in Petty France. He lived there until the Restoration. Later it became No. 19 York Street, belonged to Jeremy Bentham (who for a time lived next door), was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt, and finally demolished in 1877.
Jeremy Bentham House in Bethnal Green, East London; a modernist apartment block named after the philosopher
Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was constitutionally
incapable, except on rare occasions, of bringing his work to completion
and publication. Most of what appeared in print in his lifetime was prepared for publication by others. Several of his works first appeared in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont,
for example, Theory of Legislation, Volume 2 (Principles of the Penal
Code) 1840, Weeks, Jordan, & Company. Boston. Some made their first
appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from
Dumont's 1802 collection (and redaction) of Bentham's writing on civil
and penal legislation.
Publications
- Bentham, Jeremy (1787).
Panopticon or the Inspection-House. Wikisource. - On the Liberty of the Press, and Public Discussion. Hone. 1821.
- Schofield, Philip; Pease-Watkin, Catherine; Blamires, Cyprian, eds. (2002). Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution. Oxford: University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-924863-6.
- Bowring, John, ed. (1834). Deontology or, The science of morality. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman. p. 101.
- "Gulphs in Mankind's Career of Prosperity: A Critique of Adam Smith on Interest Rate Restrictions". Econ Journal Watch. Fairfax. 5 (1): 66. Jan 2008.
- Bentham, Jeremy (1780). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Wikisource.
- Bentham, Jeremy (1776). A fragment on government. Wikisource. This was an unsparing criticism of some introductory passages relating to political theory in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.
The book, published anonymously, was well received and credited to some
of the greatest minds of the time. Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's
defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his
theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal
to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law.
Bentham's "Fragment" was only a small part of a Commentary on the Commentaries, which remained unpublished until the twentieth century.
- Crompton, Louis, ed. (2008) [1785]. "Offences Against One's Self:". Journal of Homosexuality. 3 (4): 389–406. doi:10.1300/J082v03n04_07. ISSN 0091-8369.
- Short Review of the Declaration. Wikisource. 1776. An attack on the United States Declaration of Independence.
- Bentham, Jeremy (1816). Defence of Usury; shewing the impolicy of the present legal restraints on the terms of pecuniary bargains in a letters to a friend to which is added a letter to Adam Smith, Esq. LL.D. on the discouragement opposed by the above restraints to the progress of inventive industry (3rd ed.). London: Payne & Foss. Bentham wrote a series of thirteen "Letters" addressed to Adam Smith, published in 1787 as Defence of Usury. Bentham's main argument against the restriction is that "projectors" generate positive externalities. G.K. Chesterton identified Bentham's essay on usury as the very beginning of the "modern world". Bentham's arguments were very influential. "Writers of eminence" moved to abolish the restriction, and repeal was achieved in stages and fully achieved in England in 1854. There is little evidence as to Smith's reaction. He did not revise the offending passages in The Wealth of Nations, but Smith made little or no substantial revisions after the third edition of 1784.
- Essay on Political Tactics containing six of the Principal Rules proper to be observed by a Political Assembly In the process of a Forming a Decision: with the Reasons on Which They Are Grounded; and a comparative application of them to British and French Practice: Being a Fragment of a larger Work, a sketch of which is subjoined (First ed.). London: T. Payne. 1791.
- Bentham, Jeremy (1830). Emancipate
Your Colonies! Addressed to the National Convention of France A° 1793,
shewing the uselessness and mischievousness of distant dependencies to
an European state. London: Robert Heward. Wikisource.
- Anarchical Fallacies; Being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution (London ed.). 1796. Retrieved 8 January 2016. An attack on the Declaration of the Rights of Man decreed by the French Revolution, and critique of the natural rights philosophy underlying it.
- Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802, edited by Étienne Dumont. 3 vols)
- Punishments and Rewards (1811)
- Panopticon versus New South Wales: or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, Compared. Containing, 1. Two Letters to Lord Pelham, Secretary of State, Comparing the two Systems on the Ground of Expediency. 2. Plea for the Constitution: Representing the Illegalities involved in the Penal Colonization System. Anno 1803, printed: now first published (1812)
- A Table of the Springs of Action . London: sold by R. Hunter. 1817.
- "Swear Not At All" (1817)
- Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the form of Catechism with Reasons for Each Article, with An Introduction shewing the Necessity and the Inadequacy of Moderate Reform. London: R. Hunter, successor to Mr. Johnson. 1817.
- Church-of-Englandism and its Catechism Examined: Preceded by the Structures on the Exclusionary System, as pursued in the National Society of Schools: Interspersed with Parallel Views of the English and Scottish Established and Non-Established Churches: And Concluding with Remedies Proposed for Abuses Indicated: and An Examination of the Parliamentary System of Church Reform Lately Pursued, and Still Pursuing: Including the Proposed New Churches. London: Effingham Wilson. 1818.
Posthumous publications
On
his death, Bentham left manuscripts amounting to an estimated 30
million words, which are now largely held by UCL's Special Collections
(c. 60,000 manuscript folios) and the British Library (c.15,000 folios).
Bowring (1838–1843)
John Bowring, the young radical writer who had been Bentham's intimate friend and disciple, was appointed his literary executor
and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his
works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1838–1843. Bowring based much of
his edition on previously published texts (including those of Dumont)
rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and elected not to publish
Bentham's works on religion at all. The edition was described by the Edinburgh Review
on first publication as "incomplete, incorrect and ill-arranged", and
has since been repeatedly criticized both for its omissions and for
errors of detail; while Bowring's memoir of Bentham's life included in
volumes 10 and 11 was described by Sir Leslie Stephen as "one of the worst biographies in the language".
Nevertheless, Bowring's remained the standard edition of most of
Bentham's writings for over a century, and is still only partially
superseded: it includes such interesting writings on international relations as Bentham's A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace written 1786–89, which forms part IV of the Principles of International Law.
Stark (1952–1954)
In 1952–1954, Werner Stark published a three-volume set, Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings,
in which he attempted to bring together all of Bentham's writings on
economic matters, including both published and unpublished material.
Although a significant achievement, the work is considered by scholars
to be flawed in many points of detail, and a new edition of the economic writings is currently in preparation by the Bentham Project.
Bentham Project (1968–present)
In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of
University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition
of Bentham's writings. It set up the Bentham Project to undertake the task, and the first volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham was published in 1968. The Collected Works
are providing many unpublished works, as well as much-improved texts of
works already published. To date, 31 volumes have appeared; the
complete edition is projected to run to around seventy. The volume Of Laws in General (1970) was found to contain many errors and has been replaced by Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence (2010) In June 2017, Volumes 1–5 were re-published in open access by UCL Press.
To assist in this task, the Bentham papers at UCL are being digitised by crowdsourcing their transcription. Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL's UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre,
and the online community. The project was launched in September 2010
and is making freely available, via a specially designed transcription
interface, digital images of UCL's vast Bentham Papers collection—which
runs to some 60,000 manuscript folios—to engage the public and recruit
volunteers to help transcribe the material. Volunteer-produced
transcripts will contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the
new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and will be uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository,
widening access to the collection for all and ensuring its long-term
preservation. Manuscripts can be viewed and transcribed by signing-up
for a transcriber account at the Transcription Desk, via the Transcribe Bentham website.
Legacy
The Faculty of Laws at University College London occupies Bentham House, next to the main UCL campus.
Bentham's name was adopted by the Australian litigation funder
IMF Limited to become Bentham IMF Limited on 28 November 2013, in
recognition of Bentham being "among the first to support the utility of
litigation funding".
