Jeremy Bentham: Businessman or “Philanthropist”?

Abstract

Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her stimulating essay, “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” examines Bentham's projected prison, the Panopticon, in order to reassess prevalent views of Philosophical Radicalism and its founder. She rightly directs attention to the central importance of the Panopticon in Bentham's doctrine, but her interpretation of its significance is, I believe, wide of the mark.The major object of Ms. Himmelfarb's essay is to note and explain the extraordinary personal involvement—the obsession—of Bentham with this his most cherished project. Bentham not only waged a battle with Parliament stretching across decades to win acceptance of his plan; but, more importantly, he intended that he himself become the first warden of his novel prison. In later years, he still could not reconcile himself to defeat. Ms. Himmelfarb sees in the warden Bentham's alto ego. Bentham's scheme places the warden, the contract manager, at the literal center of the Panopticon. Invisible and apparently omniscient, all power is vested in him without any formal regulatory authority reserved to the government. The contract manager is absolute within his realm. Ms. Himmelfarb concludes that such a striking departure from conventional penal principles indicates a plan tailored to suit the personal needs and wishes of its author. There is “a poetic Tightness' to Bentham's attempt personally to play the part he had written for himself. Even if this touch were lacking, “one would be tempted to assume” psychological identification. However, Ms. Himmelfarb is able to give only one specific meaning to this identification she so rightly intuits: the Panopticon is a design for the unmitigated economic exploitation of an unfortunate few for the pecuniary advantage of society in general and the warden, Jeremy Bentham, in particular.