Bentham's Writings Research Articles

A Comprehensive Study of the Classical School of Criminology

The eighteenth century saw the development of the classical school of criminology. This theory of criminology was primarily influenced by Cesare de Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. They are regarded as the most significant intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Are regarded as the founders of the classical school of criminology and are leaders in the field of "classical" thought. Because he was a utilitarian and concerned with the happiness and well-being of the populace, Bentham's contribution to "classical" philosophy is predicated on his conviction that punishment, in the form of causing pain, should always be justified in terms of a larger benefit. Bentham's writings revolved around the notion of the pleasure-pain principle, which holds that human behavior is intended to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Beccaria thought that in order to make punishments fair and commensurate with the offence, laws had to be implemented. According to him, there are three key concepts that determine how effective crime prevention is: the likelihood of a crime occurring, its certainty, and the timing of the crime, the speed at which it is punished, the seriousness of the offence, and the extent of the suffering caused. According to Beccaria, the harshness of the punishments meted out should be commensurate with the offence committed and should not exceed what is required to dissuade the perpetrator and others from committing similar crimes in the future. Because there would be no deterrent, classical philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and Beccaria believed that the death penalty was meaningless. But in the case of manslaughter, as Bentham also holds, the death penalty should unquestionably be applied if the severity of the penalty significantly outweighs the offence. Seeing another criminal eliminated as a result of their acts doesn't seem to be a more powerful deterrence to future criminals considering engaging in the same criminal behavior. Though possibly not as much on criminal justice practice, classical philosophy has had a major influence on criminological thought generally. Since the advent of classical criminology and classical thought, the use of torture, corporal punishment, and the death penalty has decreased.

Thinking ethically: The utilitarianism approach in moral decision making

Many of us routinely employ moral reasoning when making daily judgments. When questioned about why we feel we have a moral responsibility to execute specific behaviors, we frequently cite the pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, providing the most effective approach for determining ethically correct behavior in every given circumstance. In Jeremy Bentham's writings, he believed that the most promising method to achieving such an agreement was to choose the policy that would provide the most significant net benefits to society once the harms were considered. (1) The author will examine utilitarianism's definition, application, and issues in this work. (2) consequentialism, whose central tenet is that an act's ethical position depends on its consequences' value; (3) The difference between utilitarian rule and action. Both agree that actions should be judged based on their results, but the former interprets "actions" as classes of actions while the latter as particular actions. Moreover, (4) conclude the arguments against utilitarianism. It is asserted that utilitarianism cannot accommodate the magnitude of our commitments to others, the presence of moral and political rights, and the requirements of distributive justice. In a time that has been called by some the "time of self-interest," utilitarianism serves as a compelling reminder that morality demands us to look beyond the self for the sake of all.

Frieden durch Recht und Öffentlichkeit: Die Hoffnungen und Verwirrungen der ersten Utilitaristen

The international thought of the early utilitarian thinkers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill remains little known and largely misunderstood. Most commentators give them a superficial appreciation or criticize their supposed naivety, in both cases mostly assuming that Mill borrowed his thoughts from Bentham's writings alone. This questionable reception overlooks some essential aspects of Bentham's and Mill's extensive reflections on war and peace, in particular their constant effort to overcome the tension between individual freedom and collective security. In reality, the fertile dialogue between the two thinkers gradually crystallized into an independent utilitarian peace theory centered on law and public opinion as instruments of an ambitious reform of international relations according to the principle of utility. They managed to elaborate a fragile synthesis between liberal principles and considerations of political realism, which grants their utilitarian peace theory a singular place in the historical efforts to systematically define the conditions of world peace.

An “Ingenious Moralist”: Bernard Mandeville as a Precursor of Bentham

AbstractThis article argues that Bernard Mandeville's ideas were more likely to have influenced Jeremy Bentham's writings than previously believed. The conventional interpretation of Mandeville as a forerunner of the Hayekian “theory of spontaneous order” has obscured Mandeville and Bentham's shared emphasis on legal and interventionist solutions for the issues of prostitution and prisoners. This influence is evinced by focusing on some of Mandeville's minor works, which anticipated some of Bentham's arguments. It is unlikely that Bentham directly knew of Mandeville's minor works, but his reformist and interventionist bent was consistent and discernible in the Fable, which Jeremy Bentham read in his youth.

Jeremy Bentham on Utility and Truth

SUMMARYJeremy Bentham has two very strong commitments in his thought: one is to the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the fundamental principle of morality; the other is to truth, as indicated, for instance, in his opposition to falsehood and fiction in the law. How, then, did Bentham view the relationship between utility and truth? Did he think that utility and truth simply coincided, and hence that falsehood necessarily led to a diminution in happiness, and conversely truth led to an increase in happiness? This article addresses this issue through two bodies of material: the first consists of Bentham's writings on religion under the heading of ‘Juggernaut’ and dating from 1811 to 1821; the second consists of the writings on judicial evidence dating from 1803 to 1812 and which appeared in Rationale of Judicial Evidence.

Bentham and the Development of the British Critique of Colonialism

This article examines Bentham's contribution to anti-colonial thought in the context of the development of the British radical movement that attacked colonialism on the grounds that it advantaged what Bentham called the ‘Few’ at the expense of the ‘Many’. It shows that Bentham was influenced as much by Josiah Tucker and James Anderson as by Adam Smith. Bentham's early economic critique is examined, and the sharp changes in his arguments after 1800 assessed, in the context of the American and French Revolutions and the effects of British industrialization. The article also highlights the importance of Bentham's writings inspired by the Spanish colonial crisis of the early 1820s. They show developments in his economic analysis and include some very acute discussions of the psychological satisfactions that elites could gain from colonialism. The article ends with a brief comparison between Bentham and later radical thinkers to put his ideas in context.

Introduction

Introduction Anne Brunon-Ernst (bio) Presenting the significance of Bentham's theory today in a single volume is a daunting task. The aim of this special issue is therefore far more modest. It traces some of the areas where Bentham's scholarship has made progress. The endeavour is two-fold. First it shows the extent to which Bentham scholars are rejuvenating a decrepit Bentham, so far portrayed as the outdated utilitarian of the pleasure calculus. Second it examines the impact of Bentham's utilitarianism on some contemporary debates. The timing of this publication needs to be underlined. The Tocqueville Review's interest in such an unappealing philosopher as Bentham undoubtedly lies with a renaissance in Bentham studies. This revival is due to the stimulating new edition in progress of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.1 To understand the importance of this new edition, the context of Bentham's publications requires an introductory comment. At Bentham's death, John Bowring, his secretary, edited The Works of Jeremy Bentham.2 Unfortunately, on account of Bentham's lack of time for and interest in the publication of his writings, most texts had been compiled, edited, rewritten, and translated without the supervision of the author by disciples, secretaries, editors, or translators. Indeed many documents remained in manuscript or fragmentary form.3 This made the task harder for Bowring, who produced the only complete edition to date of Bentham's works. Moreover the bias on the part of the editors could be felt in the [End Page 11] choice of texts or excerpts published and in the way some sections were rewritten and annexed to others.4 In the light of what scholars could read of Bentham's manuscripts, which had fortunately remained in the trust of the University College London and of the British Library, the Bowring edition was a very unsatisfactory presentation of Bentham's thought. The Bentham Project, headed by Philip Schofield, is working on an ongoing scientific edition of the works of Bentham, which will allow scholars to reconsider Bentham's thought in a new light, beyond the patchwork of Bowring's edited texts in Works. The first volumes of the Collected Works were published in 1968. The importance the publication was immediately felt by the academic community, as Professor D.D. Raphael stated in the Times Literary Supplement on September 27th 1974: 'The more we come to know his writings (as contrasted with the presentation of his thought by his contemporary editors, Dumont and Bowring), the more clearly we see that Bentham was a powerful and subtle thinker'. However the effect of the publication of the Collected Works on Bentham historiography has yet to be assessed, as only 27 (to date) of the anticipated 70 volumes have been published.5 Little by little, scholars are investigating the new routes opened by this unprecedented access to the 'real' Bentham, otherwise referred to as the 'authenticity' Bentham.6 Although the Bentham Project has been at work transcribing manuscripts for half a century, interest for Bentham has been gaining momentum over a decade. As the increasing number of publications and conferences focusing on Bentham amply demonstrates, this growing interest justifies the use of the term renaissance to speak of this renewed enthusiasm.7 This special issue highlights some disciplines that display a keen interest in Bentham. Firstly, The Tocqueville Review gives readers a glimpse into new readings flowing from the scholarly editions of Bentham's works. Emmanuelle de Champs, Stephen G. Engelmann and Jennifer Pitts underline the gaps between the historical Bentham and the authenticity Bentham, the first being derived from the circulation of Bentham's writings in 19th and 20th century editions.8 The Bentham who emerges from this analysis is far more insightful than the [End Page 12] traditional picture drawn by critics, starting with JS Mill and Marx, and ending with Halévy and Foucault.9 Versed in the latest editions of the Collected Works and in manuscript sources, Emmanuelle de Champs highlights the synergies between morals — i.e., rules of private conduct — and legislation — i.e., commands controlling public action —. She shows how these two questions remained linked in Bentham's writings on constitutional issues. Stephen G. Engelmann...

Bentham's Democracy

The publication of Philip Schofield's masterful Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham marks a milestone achievement in contemporary Bentham scholarship. It offers the single most comprehensive, erudite and balanced survey of Bentham's writings on politics now available. In exploring Bentham's political and democratic doctrines, Schofield enters some well-tracked territory. Bentham's programme of political reform, along with his philosophy of law, has routinely provided a major focus of attention for students of Bentham and of the English utilitarian tradition. And Schofield, inevitably and expressly, builds with profit on previous study of Bentham's democratic theory, particularly the ambitious interpretations of Bentham's Constitutional Code by Frederick Rosen and L.J. Hume.1 Still, Utility and Democracy is a distinctive contribution. Schofield approaches his subject as an historian of political thought, seeking to recover Bentham's development as a political thinker and the complex understanding of politics contained in his...

The Influence Of Mary Bentham On John Stuart Mill 1

Download this article . Catherine Pease-Watkin is a Research Fellow at the Bentham Project. Her most recent publication (co-edited with Philip Schofield and Cyprian Blamires) was Rights, Representation, and Reform - Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution (2002). Political Fallacies (co-edited with Philip Schofield) is almost ready for the press. Currently she is working on a volume of Bentham's writings for Spain and Portugal.

‘My Own Utopia’. The economics of Bentham's Panopticon

The paper analyses Bentham's theory of the economic management of the Panopticon prison he projected in 1786 and which was approved by the British Parliament in 1794, but never constructed. Its focus is on the economic arguments employed to justify the principles of management, most of which amount to the modern economic notions of market policies and principal-agent relationships. Bentham's way of conceiving these notions can be summarized in the problem of the junction of interest and duty. This paper shows that many modern notions concerning the economics of organizations and public economics are clearly foreshadowed, and sometimes even explicitly formulated, in Bentham's writings on prison management. Bentham was conscious of the important economic dimension of the Panopticon scheme and was persuaded, albeit illusorily, that an accurate economic theory of its management could favour its approval. Well before Charles Babbage's On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), he went into a detailed theoretical analysis of the requirements and dilemmas of a complex economic organization oriented towards the joint fulfilment of the goals of a variety of stakeholders: taxpayers, the government, contract managers, keepers, taskmasters, subcontractors and prisoners. He also recognized that some institutional limits must be opposed to profit-oriented management in order to preserve the life, health and mental equilibrium of subordinates.

Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘ Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.

Bentham’s Panopticon and Dumont’s Panoptique

Download this article . Catherine Pease-Watkin is a Research Fellow at the Bentham Project. Her most recent publication is Rights, Representation, and Reform - Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution and she is now working on Bentham's writings on Logic and Language.

Jeremy and Samuel Bentham – The Private and the Public 1

Download this article . Catherine Pease-Watkin is a Research Fellow at the Bentham Project. She has just finished co-editing Rights, Representation, and Reform - Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution and is now working on Bentham's writings on Logic and Language.

Jeremy and Samuel Bentham – The Private and the Public

Download this article . Catherine Pease-Watkin is a Research Fellow at the Bentham Project. She has just finished co-editing Rights, Representation, and Reform - Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution and is now working on Bentham's writings on Logic and Language.

The Fallacy of Non-Interference: The Poor Panopticon and Equality of Opportunity

Download this article . Michael Quinn was Associate Research Fellow at the Bentham Project, where he edited Bentham's writings on Poor Relief (to be published in 2001).

The Background to Bentham on Evidence

The path of those who would approach the study of Bentham's writings on Evidence has been considerably smoothed by the recent publication of William Twining's work on the evidence theories of Bentham and Wigmore. The material on evidence is now being tackled by the Bentham Project. It presents no easy task. The central core, The Rationale of Judicial Evidence, edited and published by John Stuart Mill in 1827, exists only in the printed version, the MSS from which Mill worked having disappeared. But a substantial body of related material which survives has yet to be thoroughly investigated, though William Twining has made a gallant start. A new edition of the work hitherto known as ‘An Introductory View of the Rationale of Evidence’, first printed in full in the Bowring edition of the Works of Jeremy Bentham is in preparation. The first fruits of this endeavour is that the title of that work as it should appear in due course in the new Collected Works will be Introduction to the Rationale of Evidence: An Introductory View for the Use of Lawyers as well as Non-lawyers, the title in fact given to the work by Bentham. It is intended that what follows should similarly be of use to non-lawyers as well as lawyers.

Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: The Civil Law and the Foundations of Bentham's Economic Thought

Between 1787, and the end of his life in 1832, Bentham turned his attention to the development and application of economic ideas and principles within the general structure of his legislative project. For seventeen years this interest was manifested through a number of books and pamphlets, most of which remained in manuscript form, that develop a distinctive approach to economic questions. Although Bentham was influenced by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he neither adopted a Smithian vocabulary for addressing questions of economic principle and policy, nor did he accept many of the distinctive features of Smith's economic theory. One consequence of this was that Bentham played almost no part in the development of the emerging science of political economy in the early nineteenth century. The standard histories of economics all emphasize how little he contributed to the mainstream of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debate by concentrating attention on his utilitarianism and the psychology of hedonism on which it is premised. Others have argued that the calculating nature of his theory of practical reason reduced the whole legislative project to a crude attempt to apply economics to all aspects of social and political life. Put at its simplest this argument amounts to the erroneous claim that Bentham's science of legislation is reducible to the science of political economy. A different but equally dangerous error would be to argue that because Bentham's conception of the science of legislation comprehends all the basic forms of social relationships, there can be no science of political economy as there is no autonomous sphere of activity governed by the principles of economics. This approach is no doubt attractive from an historical point of view given that the major premise of this argument is true, and that many of Bentham's ‘economic’ arguments are couched in terms of his theory of legislation. Yet it fails to account for the undoubted importance of political economy within Bentham's writings, not just on finance, economic policy, colonies and preventive police, but also in other aspects of his utilitarian public policy such as prison reform, pauper management, and even constitutional reform. All of these works reflect a conception of political economy in its broadest terms. However, this conception of political economy differs in many respects from that of Bentham's contemporaries, and for this reason Bentham's distinctive approach to problems of economics and political economy has largely been misunderstood.

Jeremy Bentham's writings on sexual non-conformity: Utilitarianism, neo-malthusianism, and sexual liberty

Jeremy Bentham's writings on sexual non-conformity: Utilitarianism, neo-malthusianism, and sexual liberty

Bentham Scholarship and the Bentham "Problem"

Bentham has finally, indubitably, Not as he had hoped to make it in his own time, as the reformer, indeed transformer, of society, law, and philosophy; nor even as he would seem to have made it now, as the subject of what is perhaps the most ambitious publishing venture of its kind ever to be undertaken in England; but rather as historical reputations are made-by becoming the focus of controversy. controversy has already attracted the attention of bibliographers and commentators, and one may be confident that before long it, and thus Bentham himself, will receive the highest accolade of the profession: not the thirty-eight volumes of collected works that will represent over a quarter of a century of collective scholarship, but the slim volume in the Heath series that confers the title and status of a historical problem. For it is as a problem that Bentham now engages us, and it is for the light that will be shed upon this problem that we will now read this new edition of his collected works.' It is difficult to see how else we may read it. Certainly most of Bentham's writings, in the form in which we already know them, are unreadable except to the most zealous scholar-and not always to him. The bulk of Bentham's writings has passed into not unjust oblivion, one editor, in 1890, remarked in introducing one of the few works he judged worthy of reprinting.2 And it is unlikely that this bulk will become any more readable in its new, bulkier form. Anyone who has seen the Bentham manuscripts at University College, London, will admire the courage and enterprise of Professor J. H. Burns and his associates in this project but will have no illusions about the outcome. new edition will be a monument to scholarship. It will be as accurate and comprehensive as Bentham's appalling handwriting and still more appalling habits of composition permit. But it may well prove to be even less readable than the eleven-volume edition published within a decade of Bentham's death by his secretary, John Bowring. To be sure, we shall be spared the double column, six-point type of the old eleven-volume edition; but are thirtyeight volumes, however agreeable in format, less forbidding? We shall also be spared the iibersetzt und verbessert Bentham that has been handed down to us by Bowring and other editors. But is the prospect of an unre-

The Theory of Legislation

This set presents in facsimile Theory of Legislation by the English utilitarian legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 1832), originally edited by tienne Dumont (1802) and later translated by Richard Hildreth (1840). In 1802, Bentham's Genevan friend, tienne Dumont (1759 1829), published a French redaction and translation of the utilitarian philosopher's writings on civil and penal law, including hitherto unpublished manuscripts on civil law (the extant mss. in the Bentham Papers at University College London date from the 1770s and 1780s). This was entitled Trait s de L gislation Civile et P nale...Publi s en Fran ois par t. Dumont (3 vols, Paris 1802), and prefaced by a Discours Pr liminaire in which Dumont clarified his role as an arranger and translator of Bentham's original manuscripts. Later, Richard Hildreth (1807 65), the famous American utilitarian and admirer of Bentham, re-translated the principal parts of Dumont's edition into English as Theory of Legislation (Boston 1840). Hildreth's 1840 edition is generally accepted as a faithful English translation of the first two volumes of Dumont. A second (corrected) edition of Hildreth's translation was published in London in 1864, and following this Hildreth's translation went through several more editions and reprints between the years 1871 and 1911. It was largely through the distribution of Hildreth's translation that Bentham's utilitarian legal philosophy gained currency in the United States. To the text and Hildreth's translation of Dumont's Discours Pr liminaire, James E. Crimmins adds an introduction, a select bibliography, and an index. The introduction explains (1) the origin of Bentham's writings on civil and penal law, their 1802 publication by Dumont and subsequent re-translation into English by Hildreth, and (2) the importance of Bentham's writings on civil law to a complete understanding of his theory of utilitarian legislation and, in particular, its libera characteristics.