Jeremy Bentham came to know Jacques-Pierre Brissot when he was in London between midwinter 1782–3 and summer 1784. They shared some opinions: Brissot indeed saw Bentham to some extent as his mentor. There was never complete accord, however; and Brissot's increasingly radical political views were not at that stage shared by Bentham. In any case, their ways parted with Bentham's prolonged sojourn with his brother in Russia between 1785 and 1788. It was revolution in France that brought renewed contact, though (...) no further personal encounters. By the winter of 1788–9 Bentham was writing, with France in mind, an increasingly elaborate work on parliamentary procedure; and by the spring Brissot was (much more expeditiously) writing and publishing his account of the subject. One element in that work dealt with an issue on which Bentham vigorously opposed Brissot; for it included a strongly argued case for a declaration of rights – something Bentham had already attacked in 1776. He renewed that attack in a letter to Brissot in the late summer of 1789. By the autumn, however, writing to Brissot again, he raised a subject on which the two could sympathise – the importance of asserting popular sovereignty in the new French constitution. That sovereignty, Bentham insisted, must extend to the administration of justice – royal authority must be rigourously excluded from control of the judiciary. The judicial establishment in France was to be Bentham's predominant concern between the winter of 1789–90 and the following summer, and he now had assistance, especially from Etienne Dumont, in translating and publicizing his work. Brissot was probably – though there is no direct evidence – aware of these efforts. In the autumn Bentham's principal concern was the promotion in France of his scheme for a model prison – the Panopticon. That cause was helped by the cordial reception in the National Assembly of his judicial reform proposals. By then he was again in touch with Brissot, whose support he now sought for the Panopticon project – at first with some success. No progress was made in 1793, however, as Brissot's revolutionary career reached first its apogee and then its disastrous end. Many years later, as Bentham's life drew to a close, Brissot's Mémoires served to remind him of their uneasy partnership in the years of revolution. (shrink)

Bentham was convinced throughout his adult life that law reform in both theory and practice was his vocation. As a deliberately briefless barrister he set out in the early 1770s to establish jurisprudence on the principle of utility. From the first, however, he was repeatedly diverted from this central task. Confronted by the authority of Blackstone, he wrote, without completing, his Comment on the Commentaries, and turned within that context to the specific theme of his Fragment on Government (1776). In (...) the later 1770s he took up the subject of punishment as his principal theme (dealing with an immediate problem in his 1778 View of the Hard-Labour Bill). His Theory of Punishment was projected as his contribution to the sires, in which he would stand beside Hume, HelvCode still incomplete when the French Revolution took Bentham's attention elsewhere. (shrink)

Summary The career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793) featured two phases, separated dramatically by the Revolution of 1789. Before the revolutionary crisis and the subsequent political struggle that was to cost him his life, Brissot was an avocet who never practised but sought instead a career as a writer—and indeed as a philosophe, seeing himself as an ally of Diderot. The improbability of such an alliance was not lessened by his early and continuing alliance with Linguet. Before embarking in1778 on what (...) would be a prolific career as a published author, Brissot had written the manuscript on which attention is focused here. This is an uncompleted ‘Plan Raisoné’ for a comprehensive sceptical critique of all systematic claims to certainty in knowledge. There is an evident though problematic relationship here with Brissot's 1782 De la vérité, but it is also clear that the influence of Rousseau and Brissot's increasingly radical political outlook must have entailed a widening divergence from the scepticism he had previously extolled—the ‘Pyrrhonism’ that would protect sensible readers against dogmatic absurdity. Death on the scaffold proclaimed certainty, not doubt. (shrink)

John Fleming , later professor in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, made his combative contribution to natural history between 1812 and 1832. As an Edinburgh student he had followed Robert Jameson's ‘Wernerian’ lead. His earliest publications, from 1813, expressed what was to be a lifelong hostility to the work of James Hutton. Yet his own thinking moved increasingly towards a ‘uniformitarian’ as opposed to a ‘catastrophist’ view of earth history. His Philosophy of Zoology embodied criticism of Cuvier. More dramatically, he became embroiled (...) in controversy with Buckland and later with Conybeare. By then the ‘uniformitarian’ hypothesis had been adopted by Lyell, with whom Fleming was in close touch from the mid-1820s. Fleming may have had some grounds for feeling that his priority in advocating uniformitarianism was later overlooked. His History of British Animals included a preface in which he elaborated his earlier hypothesis as to ‘revolutions … in the animal kingdom’ correlated with six geological epochs. Tension had then developed in Fleming's relationship with Jameson, and the early 1830s found him in a mood of increasing frustration. Reconciliation with Buckland and approval by Sedgwick still left ‘the Zoological Ishmael’ feeling that his advancement in the scientific world was blocked, perhaps permanently. In historical perspective Fleming may be seen as a minor but not insubstantial figure in the scientific landscape of the early nineteenth century. (shrink)