In _Nonsense upon Stilts¸_ first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked. (...) But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on ‘rights-based’ political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy. (shrink)

The Bentham Project is delighted to announce a call for papers for “Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire”, a conference to be held at University College London on 11-12 April 2019 to mark the forthcoming publication of Writings on Australia, a volume of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. The conference will explore themes such as the influence and impact of Bentham’s ideas on the theory and practice of punishment in convict Australia, on advocates and opponents of co...

In _Nonsense upon Stilts¸_ first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked. (...) But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on ‘rights-based’ political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction The ‘Bentham and Australia’ conference took place on 11-12 April 2019 at University College London. It was hosted by the Bentham Project to mark the forthcoming publication of Bentham's Writings on Australia, a new volume edited by Tim Causer and Philip Schofield, as part of the on-going edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Corpus In a format the Bentham Project had already tested in previous events, the ‘Bentham and Australia’ conference saw Bentham and non-Bentham...

This chapter offers a brief contextualization of the key terms space, territory, and geography. It examines some of Foucault's most well‐known and overt engagements with geography including the heterotopia and spatial partitioning. The chapter explores how Foucault went beyond these concepts to more richly worked geographical analyses in three areas: health, discipline, and governmentality. One of Foucault's most well‐known discussions is the treatment he gives to the panopticon in Discipline and Punish, the architectural principle associated with the English social reformer (...) Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. Foucault's “spatial combat” is not the hidden key to his work, but rather an aspect that he turned to throughout his life as a tool of analysis in order to think through power/knowledge. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Edición a cargo de José Luis Tasset & Francisco Vázquez García. Introducción de José Luis Tasset. Epílogo de Francisco Vázquez García.

Bentham scholarship has concentrated on certain aspects of his thought: this collection reflects that bias. Most of the articles are published since 1950, but those of his contemporaries show how his ideas became politically influential. This is an important new contribtion that will be of great use to scholars with an interest in this key thinker.

Mill, J. S. Bentham.--Whewell, W. Bentham.--Watson, J. Bentham.--Hart, H. L. A. Bentham.--Parekh, B. Bentham's justification of the principle of utility.--Peardon, T. Bentham's ideal republic.--Hart, H. L. A. Bentham on sovereignty.--Burns, J. H. Bentham's critique of political fallacies.--Mitchell, W. C. Bentham's felicific calculus.--Roberts, D. Jeremy Bentham and the Victorian administrative state.

This article argues that Bentham’s metaphysics has until recently been unfairly belittled, and that it in fact built on and surpassed that of David Hume, of whom Bentham was both an attentive student and a fierce critic. Bentham’s logic is metaphysically based, multi-levelled, and comprehensive. First, taking Hume’s empiricism as a starting point, Bentham developed the additional mechanism of “reflection” to facilitate a utilitarian pragmatic resolution to Hume’s skepticism. Second, unlike Hume, Bentham aspired to encyclopedic knowledge, especially of the human (...) mind, which he believed allowed him to place his thought on a more solid and broader foundation. Third, whereas Hume focused on the passive understanding, Bentham captured the interaction between understanding and volition. Fourth, in relation to moral approbation, Hume adopted an approach which highlighted benevolence, whereas Bentham sought to reconcile self-preference with benevolence. Fifth, Hume’s common sense moral philosophy pushed him to associate justice with social convention, and helped to make him a conservative. Bentham developed the principle of utility to direct and push forward social reform for a better world. (shrink)

This sketch of his life and work has been published in the hope that it may induce some readers to seek a closer acquaintance with his writings.

Este trabajo presenta las ideas fundamentales de Jeremy Bentham (1848-1832) en teoría jurídica, en ética y en filosofía política. Muestra que su concepción tiene las raíces en una epistemología empirista, una ontología nominalista y una original filosofía del lenguaje. La teoría del derecho contiene una teoría de las normas que incorpora un valioso precedente de la lógica deóntica. El utilitarismo hedonista que coloca como objetivo único la maximización de la felicidad constituye a su vez el fundamento de su teoría (...) de la democracia: una teoría que desconfía de todos los mecanismos de poder y dota de instrumentos a los ciudadanos para controlarlos. El último apartado analiza la fortuna de Bentham en la historia de las ideas, tratando de ser fiel con las luces y las sombras de su legado. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham's career as a writer spanned almost seventy years, from the Seven Years' War to the early 1830s, a period contemporaries called an age of revolutions and more recent historians have seen as a world crisis. This article traces Bentham's developing universalism in the context of international conflict across his lifetime and in relation to his attempts to create a 'Universal Jurisprudence'. That ambition went unachieved and his successors turned his conception of international law in a more particularist (...) direction. Going back behind Bentham's legacies to his own writings, both published and unpublished, reveals a thinker responsive to specific events but also committed to a universalist vision that helped to make him a precociously global figure in the history of political thought. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

Hart identified a utilitarian tradition in jurisprudence, which he associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. This tradition consisted in three doctrines: the separation of law and morals; the analysis of legal concepts; and the imperative theory of law. I argue, contrary to Hart, that Bentham did not adopt a 'positivist' conception of law whether understood in terms of the separation of legal theory and morality or in terms of the separation of law and morals. Misinterpreting Bentham's approach to (...) the analysis of language, Hart was wrong to assume that Bentham's jurisprudential project was a precursor to his own attempt to provide a morally neutral description of a legal system. It was this assumption that led to mistakes in Hart's editing of Of Laws in General. Bentham's utilitarian theory of law should be recognised as a distinct alternative to Common Law and Natural Law theories. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham is a philosopher who deserves a prominent position in the history of democratic ideas. He not only thought popular rule as a vehicle for materializing his vision of utilitarian society, but also gave us a detailed picture of the basic institutions of the form of democratic governance he envisaged. It is also noteworthy that in hisradical system the people, who are the ultimate and undisputable source of all power, are protected from the authoritarian tendencies of state authorities (...) not by a bill of constitutional rights but by a set of enhanced democratic powers that enable them to exercise strict control over their elected representatives. In this essay we present an outline of his ?unusuallyliberal? theory of democracy based on recently published texts and studies as well as a brief assessment of its strong and weak points. (shrink)

En philosophie du droit, on a coutume d’opposer juspositivisme et jusnaturalisme et de placer Jeremy Bentham dans la première catégorie. Plusieurs auteurs tiennent même Bentham pour le père du juspositivisme. Je prétends pour ma part que cette façon de classer Bentham est inadéquate et nécessite une importante mise au point. S’il est vrai que Bentham était un adversaire des doctrines du droit naturel, il ne s’ensuit pas pour autant qu’il appartient au positivisme juridique; et les raisons qui pourraient justifier (...) le classement de Bentham parmi les juspositivistes militent aussi pour son association au jusnaturalisme. Que faut-il entendre exactement par « positivisme juridique », et en quel sens Bentham y adhère-t-il? C’est à cette double question que le présent article est consacré. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham's, hitherto known as, has recently appeared in definitive form in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. The essay contains what is arguably the most influential critique of natural rights, and by extension human rights, ever written. Bentham's fundamental argument was that natural rights lacked any ontological basis, except to the extent that they reflected the personal desires of those propagating them. Moreover, by purporting to have a basis in nature, the language of natural rights gave a (...) veneer of respectability to what, in the case of the French Revolutionaries at least, were at bottom violent and selfish passions. Yet that having been said, Bentham had no objection to the notion of a right which expressed a moral claim founded on the principle of utility. However, the phrase better captured what was at stake, and avoided all the ambiguities otherwise associated with the word. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham's arguments regarding fallibility and infallibility comprise a fundamental and distinctive dimension of his democratic theory. Writing against the assertion of infallibility in religious, political, and legal contexts, Bentham claimed that authorities encouraged a popular belief in their own infallibility as a means of corrupting the people's faculties of judgment. In so doing, rulers were able to secure their own interests against the public welfare and to inhibit the possibility of utilitarian reform. Such arguments may have influenced John (...) Stuart Mill's well-known discussions of fallibility and infallibility in works including On Liberty. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe goal of this paper is to locate indirect legislation within Bentham’s art of legislation, and to distinguish it, as far as possible, from direct legislation. Along the way, some parallels are drawn between indirect legislation on the one hand, and the Nudge theory of Thaler and Sunstein on the other. It will be argued that many expedients categorized by Bentham as indirect legislation are simultaneously exercises of direct legislation. Another set of indirect expedients act on knowledge, and involve efforts (...) to eliminate asymmetries of information between potential offender and potential victim by providing official standards and disseminating a plethora of factual information. Other forms of indirect legislation threaten the coherence of Bentham’s theory of law, firstly by regarding all government actions as exercises in legislation, and secondly by turning the formers of public opinion into legislators. Insofar as some forms of indirect legislation operate by sleight of hand, they conflict with Bentham’s commitment to transparency in the exercise of public power, reflecting a tension between reality and appearance which runs through his thought. (shrink)

There is large, imposing-looking box in a wing of University College, London, that contains the lifelike remains of the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham requested that upon his death, which occurred in 1832, his body should first be used for purposes of a medical lecture and then be place on display. His request was entirely utilitarian in character. For as a famous individual, Bentham could argue that it made less sense to be buried and then have a statue constructed (...) of his likeness than to eliminate the burial by having himself made into a statue. He called the latter an auto-icon. (shrink)

This paper pr o vides an o v e r vi e w of the themes presented in Bentha m ' s w ork Scotch Reform -a n e w w ork being prepared for pu b lication from Bentha m ' s manuscripts b y Oxford Un i v ersity Press as pa r t of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Attention is focused on the relationship bet w een the system of l e g al procedure (...) proposed and the under l ying principle of utili t y . T w o issues are highlighte d , the nature of Bentha m ' s anti-nomian thesis for c i vil cou r ts and the parad o x of requiring restraint on the judicial control of c i vil procedure, w hilst simultaneous l y rem o ving all r ules of action and all o wing increased judicial discretion. (shrink)

En el marco ambiental del XIX se produce la penetración de Jeremy Bentham en el horizonte intelectual salmantino. Bentham el filósofo-legislador se avenía perfectamente con el espíritu de renovación jurídico y política que se respiraba en los círculos más inquietos de la Universidad de Salamanca a comienzos del siglo XIX. El método utilitarista de Bentham propiciaba una vía nueva para fundamentar una ética jurídica y política a posteriori; en vista de los resultados dolorosos y placenteros del acto humano y (...) de sus repercusiones prósperas o nocivas en el plano social. De ahí, que la minoría intelectual que en la Universidad de Salamanca aspiraba a una profunda revisión de los esquemas didácticos vigentes eligiera la doctrina de Bentham como la más adecuada y eficaz para el logro de sus propósitos. (shrink)

IntroductionIn this paper I would like to compare two forms of utilitarianism: the late eighteenth-century doctrine systematized by Jeremy Bentham and the philosophy advocated by its most visible contemporary proponent, Peter Singer . Here is how the latter introduces the former in the headword “Ethics” of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:[…] Jeremy Bentham is properly considered the father of modern Utilitarianism. It was he who made the Utilitarian principle serv..

Nineteenth-century philosophers, including J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticized Jeremy Bentham for his supposed aesthetic insensibility to the arts, especially literature. Through analysis of Bentham’s manuscript comments on novelists, both negative and positive, this essay analyzes the pleasure Bentham took in fictional narratives in the context of his advocacy for sexual and gender minorities, disabled persons, colonized and enslaved persons, children, and animals. Drawing from a wide range of Bentham’s papers, the author then focuses on a vivid (...) manuscript proposing ‘a new and improved Drama,’ in which Bentham examines the desire to be immersed in an interactive dramatic experience of one’s favorite works of fiction. (shrink)

Charles Ogden (1889-1957) is best known as the senior author of The Meaning of Meaning, the inventor of the 850-word system of Basic English and the expositor of the writings of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's work had confirmed Ogden in the conviction he had nurtured for 20 years: that language, for all its pitfalls, could be controlled, thus ensuring effective communication and international understanding, perhaps even preventing war.

A la fin du xviiie siècle, Jeremy Bentham invente le concept de législation indirecte pour penser d’autres modes de régulations dans l’état utilitariste qu’il construit. Ces formes normantes de contrôle se retrouvent à la fois dans la biopolitique de Michel Foucault et dans les mécanismes de régulation post-modernes (nudges, architecture de choix, New Management, etc.). Deux éléments sont communs à cette variété d’instruments : la collecte d’information et le gouvernement par l’image. Le premier permet la diffusion de la connaissance (...) pour aider la prise de décision, la mise en place d’objectifs et la modification des comportements. Le second montre que les individus se conforment à une conduite parce qu’ils craignent le jugement, réel ou imaginé, de leurs pairs. (shrink)

A review of the life and works of Jeremy Bentham, the "philosopher of legislation" and an analysis of his legacy in law and politics.

Jeremy Bentham gilt als Gründervater des Utilitarismus. Seine oftmals variierte Formel vom "größten Glück der größten Zahl" fehlt in kaum einem als Überblick angelegten Standardwerk der Moralphilosophie oder der politischen Ideengeschichte. Mit seiner materialreichen Studie liefert Wilhelm Hofmann die erste deutschsprachige Gesamtdarstellung der politisch-utilitaristischen Aufklärungsphilosophie des englischen Denkers. Ausgangsüberlegung seiner Rekonstruktion der politischen Theorie Benthams ist die These, dass sich an dessen Werk die paradigmatische Formulierung des Selbstverständnisses von Politik in modernen Gesellschaften ablesen lässt.

The study deals with the content and transformations of Jeremy Bentham’s theory of sanctions and its role in the development of the contemporary understanding of how moral regulation works. In An Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, Bentham defines sanction as a type of pleasure and pain that gives the binding force to some law or rule and mentions four sanctions: physical, political, popular, or moral, and religious. The popular, or moral, sanction rests on such a motive (...) as ‘the love of reputation’. Unlike the motive of ‘good-will’, ‘the love of reputation’ has some drawbacks that lessen its general efficiency and its contribution to the fulfillment of the principle of utility. Though the development of civilization makes them less dangerous. In the Deontology, two more sanctions were added: sympathetic (the pain generated by the contemplation of the pain suffered by a fellow creature) and retributive (the pain caused to a perpetrator by retaliatory actions of his/her immediate victim). The renewed typology of sanctions is discussed by Bentham in the context of the activity of a moralist, or a deontologist. There are two main interpretations of moral sanctions in the contemporary ethics: ‘the moral sanction as a public condemnation of a perpetrator’ and ‘the moral sanction as a self-condemnation of a perpetrator (his/her feeling of guilt, pricks of conscience)’. Bentham was a major figure in the development of the first interpretation. However, his extended typology contributed to the development of the second. Bentham’s sympathetic sanction in the case of ‘pains of sympathy’ that experienced by a perpetrator and caused him/her by pains of his/her victims is not identical to a guilt-feeling but can work without a public condemnation. (shrink)

The author reflects on the relation between the different veins of Bentham's thought and on the various experiences which influenced them.

The article examines Bentham's writings and activities during the period 1788 to 1803, when much of his energy was devoted to the unsuccessful Panopticon prison project. Focusing on the varied strategies pursued by Bentham to secure public notice for his legislative programme, the discussion emphasizes how far in his writings he had moved from the central core of his legislative theory by the first years of the nineteenth century. This perspective, in turn, clarifies the critical importance to Bentham's later career (...) of the successful reception of Etienne Dumont's redaction of the Benthamite legislative science in the 1802 Trait?s de l?gislation. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce offered an evaluation of Bentham's philosophy to the effect that on some points Bentham's performance was of great value, but essentially, he was ‘a shallow logician’ confined to analysis of ‘lower motive’. This paper argues that Bentham's logic is deeply metaphysically based, multi‐levelled, and comprehensive. There are at least three constituent parts in his utilitarian logic: the first is his ontology, with its distinction between real and fictitious entities, and with pain and pleasure constituting the core real entities; (...) the second is his reductionism in, and analytical view of, simple and complex pleasures and pains; the third is the distinction between private ethics and public ethics. Bentham's logic is staunchly based on empiricism and truth and he developed a pragmatic utilitarian solution to overcome the potential impasse of Hume's scepticism through a mechanism of reflection. Even the doctrines of belief and abduction embraced and developed by Peirce are contained in Bentham's utilitarian logic. Bentham would certainly take Peirce's philosophy as ipse dixitism. Peirce was not in fact a serious reader of Bentham and failed to employ the distinction between argument and argumentation in his study of Bentham's logic. (shrink)

La présente étude se propose d’examiner la conception tout à fait originale de Bentham concernant une éducation démocratique fondée sur des intellectuels qui visent à établir une société libérale, contrairement à l’éducation civique d’aujourd’hui. Tout d’abord, j’examine les recherches récentes sur l’éducation civique, qui sont liées à un tournant délibératif, en montrant en quoi elles diffèrent des objectifs que Bentham s’assignait pour l’éducation. Ensuite, en évoquant l’évolution des travaux de recherche concernant les relations entre Bentham et Foucault, je souligne que (...) Foucault appréhendait l’aspect démocratique du panoptique de Bentham et le liait à la gouvernementalité libérale. En troisième lieu, j’analyse les idées de Bentham sur l’éducation. Cette analyse comprend deux volets : ses idées concernant l’éducation de bons citoyens dotés d’intelligence, et sa conception de l’éducation comme expérimentation. Bentham considérait l’éducation intellectuelle de l’école chrestomatique comme une protection contre les illusions pernicieuses. Les idées de Bentham sur l’éducation, d’une part, visaient à favoriser l’émergence de bons citoyens pouvant participer au Tribunal de l’opinion publique, et de dirigeants compétents ayant les qualités intellectuelles voulues pour diriger ou suivre l’opinion publique. D’autre part, Bentham souhaitait ardemment que l’éducation fût une expérimentation destinée à établir une société libérale entièrement recréée depuis ses fondements. Il exprima ce souhait dans la dernière partie de ses lettres sur Le Panoptique, qui traitait de l’application des principes du panoptique aux écoles et de son plan de contrôle des pauvres. Afin de réformer la société existante gouvernée par un petit nombre de dirigeants uniquement soucieux de leurs intérêts dévoyés, il chercha à promouvoir la publicité et l’éducation intellectuelle pour contrer cette mauvaise gestion. Si, par contre, la société pouvait être établie de manière idéale dès ses débuts, alors une société entièrement nouvelle pourrait émerger sur la base des principes utilitaristes, qui donneraient corps à l’identification artificielle des intérêts entre chaque individu et l’ensemble de la communauté. La pensée éducative de Bentham était une entreprise à double face, qui s’adressait à la fois au présent et à l’avenir. (shrink)

Au cours des années 1770, ayant trouvé sa vocation de réformateur du droit et guidé par le principe du plus grand bonheur du plus grand nombre, Jeremy Bentham rassemble ses idées dans de volumineux manuscrits qu’il classe sous le titre de « principes préparatoires ». La publication récente de ces feuillets par Douglas Long et Philip Schofield entr’ouvre la porte de l’atelier du philosophe au tout début de sa carrière. Car la décennie 1770 est particulièrement féconde pour Bentham. C’est (...) pend... (shrink)

In February 1828 a Royal Commission was appointed to examine the law of Real Property of England and Wales. The Commission sat for four years and examined a vast amount of material, recommended certain changes in the law, and drafted several bills for consideration by parliament. Four massive reports were eventually presented to parliament in May 1829, June 1830, May 1832, and lastly in April 1833. As a result parliament enacted a limited number of piecemeal reforms, but did not attempt (...) a major revision of the law. (shrink)