Chapter Info (Click Here)
Book No. – 4 (Political Science)
Book Name – Western Political Thought (Shefali Jha)
What’s Inside the Chapter? (After Subscription)
1. UTILITARIAN PRINCIPLES
2. BENTHAM’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
3. THE PANOPTICON: SURVEILLANCE AND CHOICE
4. PROBLEMS WITH BENTHAM’S THEORY
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LANGUAGE
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832): Representative Government as the Maximizer of Utility
Chapter – 9
Table of Contents
- Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in London, into a wealthy family of an English attorney.
- A precocious child, he read Latin at age three and Locke’s philosophical works before his teens.
- At 12, he enrolled at Oxford University, completing his B.A. and M.A. at Queen’s College (1760–1766).
- Bentham attended London law courts and was called to the bar in 1769, though he never practiced law.
- William Blackstone, an English jurist, gave lectures at Oxford, which Bentham attended in 1763. He criticized Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) and gained attention.
- Bentham’s writings were often fragmentary; his friend Etienne Dumont translated them into French and published as A Theory of Legislation (1802).
- Some of Bentham’s original works include:
- A Fragment on Government (1776)
- Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
- Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817)
- Bentham’s Radical Reform Bill (1819)
- The Constitutional Code (1830)
- Bentham viewed himself as a legal reformer, not a practicing lawyer.
- He worked as a legal and political reform advocate, including spending time in Russia (1785) as an adviser to Catherine the Great.
- In the 1790s, Bentham signed a contract with the British government for prison reform, including the design of the Panopticon, an ideal prison structure that was never realized.
- In the 1820s, Bentham’s Constitutional Code aimed to influence liberal governments in Spain and Portugal, later shifting to potential influence on Greece and Latin America.
- Bentham collaborated with James Mill, whom he met in 1808, and they co-founded The Westminster Review in 1824, advocating for utilitarianism.
- Bentham died in 1832 during the period of Parliamentary reform struggles in England.
- He inspired the Philosophical Radicals, intellectuals who believed societies could be reformed through philosophical knowledge and reason, rejecting inherited traditions.
- The Philosophical Radicals saw knowledge advancing in a way that led to moral reformation, a key idea of a knowledge-based society.
- Bentham was a supporter of the French Revolution and a rationalist and radical in thought and conduct, advocating for breaking from the past to reorganize society based on enlightened plans.
- Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism was central to his political philosophy, and he acknowledged influences from Hume, Helvetius, and Priestley.
- From Hume and Helvetius, Bentham derived the idea of utility, and from Priestley, he adopted the idea of promoting the happiness of the majority in society.