Jeremy Bentham

• 1. Introduction

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  Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case, dressed in dark clothes. Beneath the clothing, the body is a skeleton padded out with hay, and the head is made of wax. The man himself planned every detail of this arrangement before he died. Why would a thinker who valued reason and usefulness above all choose to become his own memorial? What kind of life produced that wish? And how did one man, who rarely finished a book, end up arguing about prisons, police, language, animals, money and empires? The answers begin with a will, a walking stick with a name, and a very particular idea of what the dead owe the living.

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• 2. The Auto-Icon

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  On the 30th of May 1832, Bentham dated a will that handed his body to his friend Dr Thomas Southwood Smith. A paper written two years earlier was attached to it, headed with the words Auto Icon. It told Southwood Smith to assemble the skeleton in a chair, seated in the attitude Bentham took while thinking and writing. The figure was to wear one of his black suits and hold the staff he carried in old age. A case was to bear his name, followed by the letters ob and the day of his death. If friends and disciples ever wished to gather and honour the founder of the greatest happiness system, the case was to be carried into the room.

  The wish was not a late whim. In 1769, at the age of 21, Bentham had already left his body for dissection to the physician and chemist George Fordyce. Fordyce's daughter Maria Sophia later married Bentham's brother Samuel. Bentham then made his case in an essay titled Auto-Icon, or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. A country gentleman with rows of trees leading to his house, he suggested, could alternate his family's auto-icons with the trees. Copal varnish, he wrote, would protect the faces from rain.

  Bentham died on the 6th of June 1832, aged 84, at his home in Queen Square Place in Westminster. He had kept writing until about a month before. Invitations went out on the 8th of June, and at 3 p.m. the next day Southwood Smith gave a long oration over the remains. It took place at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine in Southwark. The printed version carries an engraving of the body partly covered by a sheet.

  The plan for the head went badly. Southwood Smith tried mummifying it, drawing on the preservation practices of New Zealand's Māori. He placed the head under an air pump over sulphuric acid to draw off the fluids. The method worked, technically, but left dried, darkened skin stretched tight across the skull. The result was thought too macabre to use. The real head sat in the same case as the figure for many years, until students turned it into the target of repeated pranks. It was then locked away.

  The figure itself travelled. From 1833 it stood in Southwood Smith's consulting rooms in Finsbury Square. When he gave up private practice in the winter of 1849-50, it moved to 36 Percy Street, the studio of the painter Margaret Gillies, who made studies of it. In March 1850, Southwood Smith offered it to Henry Brougham, who readily accepted it for the college. In 2013, when Sir Malcolm Grant retired as provost, the body attended his final council meeting. That was the only time it had ever been taken to one, despite a persistent myth that it sits at every meeting, recorded as present but not voting.

  The man behind the figure was disciplined and odd in equal measure. He rose at 6 am, walked for two hours or more, and worked until 4 pm. He called his walking stick Dapple and his cat The Reverend Sir John Langbourne. He never married, though he fell for several women and wrote about sex. As a young visitor to Bowood House, the country seat of his patron Lord Lansdowne, he fell unsuccessfully in love with the ladies of the house. At eighty he wrote again to one of them, and the mention of Bowood could still bring tears. A biographer recorded his plea: "Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future, do not let me go back to the past."

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• 3. Pleasure and Pain

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  The family story says Bentham was found as a toddler at his father's desk, reading a multi-volume history of England. He was born in Houndsditch, London, to the attorney Jeremiah Bentham and Alicia Woodward, in a wealthy Tory household. He began Latin at three and learned the violin. At seven he played sonatas by Handel at dinner parties. His father sent him to The Queen's College, Oxford, in 1760, when he was 12. He took his bachelor's degree in 1764 and his MA in 1767, trained as a lawyer, and was called to the bar in 1769. He never practised. English law, in his eyes, was a swamp of complexity that he named the "Demon of Chicane".

  The idea that would replace it reached him at about the age of 20. A copy of Helvétius' De l'esprit, he later said, "fell into his hands". He credited Montesquieu, Barrington, Beccaria and Helvétius with setting him on the principle of utility, "but most of all Helvétius". He may also have met the pleasure-centred thought of Epicurus at Oxford, through Cicero's unsympathetic account in the Tusculan Disputations.

  Bentham's fundamental axiom was "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". He said he took the phrase from Joseph Priestley. The closest Priestley actually came was a statement about the good and happiness of the majority of a state's members. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789, Bentham opened with an image of two masters. Nature, he wrote, has placed mankind under the governance of pain and pleasure, which govern everything people do, say and think. By happiness he meant a predominance of pleasure over pain, physical as well as spiritual.

  He wanted pleasures and pains measured. He rated them by intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity and extent. His fuller list of this felicific calculus sorted 12 pains and 14 pleasures, a test for the happiness factor of any act. The measure applied to everything, including art. Bentham held that if the game of push-pin gave more pleasure than music or poetry, it was the more valuable.

  The system had stern consequences for lawmakers. Punishment, he argued, is itself an evil that needs justifying. Unnecessary laws and penalties could breed vices worse than the ones they targeted. He also denied that each person's pursuit of happiness is automatically right, because private pursuits can leave society worse off. He was unusual among major philosophers in endorsing psychological egoism. From 1809 to 1823 he also carried out an exhaustive examination of religion, aiming to remove belief from people's minds.

  The principle needed a place to prove itself in practice. Bentham found one in the design of a building.

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• 4. The Prison That Never Rose

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  In 1786 and 1787, Bentham travelled to Krichev in White Russia, now Belarus, to visit his brother Samuel. Samuel was managing industrial projects for Prince Potemkin. He had conceived a circular building at the centre of a larger compound, letting a few managers oversee a large, unskilled workforce. Jeremy repeatedly acknowledged that the basic idea was his brother's. He adapted it to prisons and described it in letters to his father.

  The watchmen in the central tower could not be seen. They therefore did not need to be on duty at every moment, so the prisoners effectively did the watching themselves. Bentham added contract management, meaning a director paid to lower the average rate of mortality. He told a parliamentary committee on criminal law reform that he would serve as gaoler without a salary. The prisoners would work, walking on wheels to spin looms or drive a water wheel, so the prison could even earn money.

  He published the material as a book in 1791, with drawings from the architect Willey Reveley. Efforts in Ireland and revolutionary France failed. Then he persuaded the prime minister, William Pitt, and in 1794 was paid £2,000 for preliminary work. The site hunt dragged on. Battersea Rise ran into legal problems and the objections of Earl Spencer. Hanging Wood near Woolwich proved unsatisfactory. At Tothill Fields, Earl Grosvenor objected to a prison overlooking his house. In November 1799 Bentham bought land at Millbank for the Crown for £12,000. It was marshy, unhealthy and too small. When he asked for more, the government replied that he should build only a small experimental prison.

  Pitt resigned in 1801, and in 1803 the Addington administration dropped the scheme. "They have murdered my best days," Bentham said. The government revived the idea in 1811 and 1812, when he was 63 and still willing to be governor. When no real commitment appeared, he turned to seeking compensation. He first claimed nearly £700,000 and settled for £23,000. He had spent some sixteen years on the plan.

  The bitterness did not fade. Bentham blamed the King and an aristocratic elite. The historian Philip Schofield argues that this sense of injustice helped shape his idea of "sinister interest", the vested interests of the powerful working against the public good. In the twentieth century, Michel Foucault saw the panopticon as typical of the disciplinary institutions of the 19th century.

  One collaboration did succeed. Working with Patrick Colquhoun against corruption in the Pool of London, Bentham helped bring about the Depredations on the Thames Act 1800. It created the Thames River Police, the country's first preventive police force, thirty years before Robert Peel's reforms.

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• 5. Nonsense Upon Stilts

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  In 1776, Bentham published his first major attack on the English legal establishment, anonymously. It dissected the opening passages of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Bentham rejected Blackstone's defence of judge-made law and legal fictions, his appeal to a social contract and his use of natural law. The book was well received and credited to some of the greatest minds of the day. It was only a small part of a longer Commentary on the Commentaries, which stayed unpublished until the twentieth century.

  That same year, the British government stayed publicly silent on the American Declaration of Independence. Instead it secretly commissioned the London lawyer John Lind to write a rebuttal. His 130-page tract included an essay by his friend Bentham titled "Short Review of the Declaration", which mocked the Americans' political philosophy. Bentham called the Declaration a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted".

  His target was natural rights, which he called "nonsense upon stilts". Rights, in his view, came from law, not from God or nature. He later wrote an attack on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Through correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, he was declared an honorary citizen of France. He nonetheless condemned the violence after the Jacobins took power in 1792. Yet he valued Magna Carta, citing it to argue that the treatment of convicts in Australia was unlawful.

  Language itself worried him. His Theory of Fictions separated "fabulous entities", such as Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from "fictitious entities", such as laws, rights and obligations. The second kind has no physical existence but is needed for reasoning. He warned that such entities could hide the truth or be used for deception, especially in law. He saw legal fictions such as corporate personhood and sovereignty as useful or misleading depending on how they were used.

  His answer was a single clear code. He coined the verb "to codify" and was the first aggressive advocate of turning all common law into coherent statutes. His grand ambition was a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. In 1811 he wrote to President James Madison offering to write one for the young country. Learning that most American law was state-based, he wrote to the governors of every state with the same offer. Nobody accepted. Almost every common law jurisdiction, England included, has rejected codification. His writing still laid the foundation for the moderately successful work of David Dudley Field II a generation later.

  His view of America softened with age. In an 1817 letter to John Adams Smith he called himself a "Philo-Yankee". Writing to Andrew Jackson in 1830, he said he was "at heart more of a United-States-man than an Englishman".

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• 6. Who Can Suffer

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  In 1780, Bentham looked at the Code Noir, the French law that gave slaves only limited protection, and drew a startling comparison. English law, he wrote, treated animals as the law treated slaves. He predicted that animals might one day gain rights that only tyranny had withheld. The test, he argued, was not reason or speech. A full-grown horse or dog is far more rational and talkative than an infant of a day, a week or a month. He put it this way: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" He called the ability to suffer the "insuperable line".

  He was not a vegetarian crusader. Bentham accepted that animals could be killed for food or to defend human life, if they were spared needless suffering. He had no objection to medical experiments with a definite aim and a fair prospect of benefit. In a March 1825 letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle, he objected to inflicting pain without that purpose. He called it cruelty, and he warned that the habit grows stronger the more it is indulged.

  He applied the same logic to people. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including of children. On gender, he said it was the legally inferior position of women that made him choose the career of a reformer in 1759, when he was eleven. The American writer John Neal later claimed that he had converted Bentham to women's rights during their association from 1825 to 1827. Either way, Bentham argued for complete equality between the sexes, including women's suffrage, divorce rights and the right to hold political office.

  His boldest essay stayed in a drawer. Written around 1785 and titled "Paederasty (Offences Against One's Self)", it argued for liberalising the laws against homosexual sex. He did not consider such acts unnatural, calling them merely "irregularities of the venereal appetite". He thought society's harsh response to a largely private matter was out of proportion. Fear of offending public morality kept it unpublished. Some of his writings on sexual nonconformity appeared in 1931, but this essay waited until 1978, when the Journal of Homosexuality printed it as the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England.

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• 7. Markets and Empire

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  In 1787, Bentham published thirteen letters addressed to Adam Smith under the title Defence of Usury. He argued that restricting interest rates was a mistake, because "projectors", people with new ventures, create positive externalities. G. K. Chesterton called the essay the very beginning of the "modern world". Writers of eminence took up its arguments, and England finally repealed the restriction fully in 1854. Evidence of Smith's reaction is thin. He left the offending passages of The Wealth of Nations untouched, though he made few changes after its third edition in 1784.

  On the economy at large, Bentham leaned toward laissez-faire. When government sought to raise national wealth, he said, the motto should be "Be quiet". He recognised diminishing marginal utility, the idea that an extra pound means less to a rich man than a poor one, and accepted some redistributive taxation. But he warned against taking too much, which would tax industry to support idleness. He also proposed "Pauper Management", a chain of large workhouses. On money, he favoured monetary expansion as a path to full employment, and historians count him as an early precursor of welfare economics.

  Empire was another matter. His 1793 pamphlet Emancipate Your Colonies! criticised French colonialism, and in the early 1820s he urged liberal Spain to free its New World colonies. In Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace, he told Britain to give up its own. Empire, he argued, was financially unsound, taxed the poor at home, swelled the military and rested on misguided ideas of honour and glory. The scholar Barbara Arneil calls him a pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist thinker, and the label points to a contradiction.

  The contradiction shows in his racial views. In 1782 he wrote that English ascendancy was one of wisdom and understanding. He also wrote that it was in the long-term interests of India to be governed by a civilised nation like Britain. In an 1802 letter to Lord Pelham, he described Aboriginal people in New South Wales in contemptuous terms, as "brutes in human shape". He repeated the hostility toward "uncivilized aborigines" in his 1831 Colonization Company Proposal.

  That proposal was a commentary, drafted in August 1831 and never published. It responded to a plan to found a free colony on the south coast of Australia, in what became South Australia. Bentham had no hand in drafting the plan itself, which was prepared under Robert Gouger, Earl Grey and Anthony Bacon.

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• 8. Disciples and Doubters

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  In 1823, Bentham and James Mill co-founded The Westminster Review for the "Philosophical Radicals", a circle of younger followers. John Bowring became so close that Bentham described the bond as "son and father" and made him political editor, then literary executor. Edwin Chadwick, a secretary whom Bentham rewarded with a large legacy, went on to help shape the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. Others who learned from him included Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, the jurist John Austin and John Neal.

  University College London claims him as its "spiritual founder", with some caution. Bentham was 78 when London University opened in 1826. His direct role was to buy a single £100 share, making him one of over a thousand shareholders. Still, he wanted education open to people who were poor or outside the Church of England, and the new university admitted all regardless of race, creed or political belief. He failed to get Bowring a professorship, but he oversaw the appointment of Austin as first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829. A large painting by Henry Tonks shows Bentham approving the university's plans, but it dates from 1922 and the scene is imaginary.

  The sharpest doubts came from those closest to him. John Stuart Mill revised utilitarianism and attacked Bentham's picture of human nature for ignoring conscience, judging it to have done "very serious evil". The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb said the greatest happiness principle threatened liberty as much as rights. Gerald Postema complained that no concept suffers more at Bentham's hand than justice. Others note that Bentham's calculus would seem to allow torturing one person for the benefit of many. P. J. Kelly replies that Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented this.

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were interested in Bentham in their youth. Marx later called him "a genius of bourgeois stupidity". Milton Friedman and Henry Hazlitt, by contrast, were influenced by him. In 2013 the Australian litigation funder IMF Limited renamed itself Bentham IMF Limited, on the 28th of November, citing his early support for litigation funding. The Faculty of Laws at UCL sits in Bentham House.

  Much of Bentham's work reached readers through other hands. He was an obsessive reviser who rarely finished anything, and most of what appeared in his lifetime was prepared by others. Several works first appeared in French, edited by Étienne Dumont. Since 1959, UCL's Bentham Project has been working through the surviving papers to publish a definitive edition of his writings, and that edition is still being assembled.

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