Bentham, Jeremy

Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. He published anonymously in 1776 Fragment on Government, in form a criticism of Blackstone's Commentaries, in which he first sketched his theory of government. While in Russia, 1785–8, he wrote his Defence of Usury (1787) and a series of letters on a Panopticon (1791), a scheme for improving prison discipline. In 1789, he published Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation. Besides these he produced a number of influential works on ethics and jurisprudence, and works on logic and political economy; the vast mass of his papers were never properly prepared for publication. Bentham was greatly assisted by his devoted disciple Etienne Dumont of Geneva, who compiled several treatises based on Bentham's manuscripts which he published between 1802 and 1825 in French.

It is in the Fragment on Government and more fully in the Principles that he enunciates the political and ethical theory of Utility by which he is best remembered. ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’ Pain and pleasure are the ‘sovereign masters’ governing man's conduct; ‘it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do’. The criterion of the goodness of a law is the principle of Utility, the measure in which it subserves the happiness to which every individual is equally entitled. The motive of an act always being self-interest, it is the business of law and education to make the sanctions sufficiently strong to induce the individual to subordinate his own happiness to that of the community. Bentham believed it possible that the quantitative value of pains and pleasures as motives of action could be minutely calculated, which would give scientific accuracy to morals and legislation. His democratic views are expressed in his Constitutional Code (1830); Chrestomathia (1816) is a series of papers on education. He also propounded a number of valuable reforms in the administration of English justice, which since his time have been applied. In 1824 with the assistance of J. Mill he founded the Westminster Review.