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Book No. – 3 (Political Science)
Book Name – A History of Political Thought: Plato to Marx (Subrata Mukherjee & S. Ramaswamy)
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1. LIFE SKETCH
2. MEANING OF UTILITARIANISM
3. THE MODERN STATE
4. ECONOMIC IDEAS
5. NOTION OF LIBERTY, RIGHTS AND LAW
6. WOMEN AND GENDER EQUALITY
7. AS A HUMANIST
8. CONCLUSION
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Jeremy Bentham
Chapter – 10
Table of Contents
- Jeremy Bentham applied utilitarian principles to various political, legal, and administrative problems with unmatched thoroughness.
- Bentham was a theoretical reformer, not just a moral and political philosopher.
- He provided key arguments for many important reforms in the nineteenth century.
- Bentham was not an originator of ideas but had a distinctive temperament and mental activity.
- His ideas were not new discoveries but were influenced by thinkers like Hume and Helvetius.
- Bentham was a dominant figure in the radical reform group, focused on practical problems rather than mysticism like Rousseau.
- He approached reform with a scientific spirit, believing wrongs could be measured and happiness assured once measurements were made.
- Bentham (1748–1832), founder of Utilitarianism, was also a philosopher, jurist, social reformer, and activist.
- Though trained as a lawyer, he abandoned the practice to pursue legal reforms and the examination of law’s basis.
- His utilitarian philosophy emphasized the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
- Bentham aimed at building the fabric of felicity through reason and law.
- He advocated reforms in prisons, legislation, parliament, and called for a new penal code for England.
- Bentham was seen by J.S. Mill as a “progressive philosopher,” benefactor of mankind, and a major questioner of the status quo.
- Bentham had many critics:
- Goethe described him as a “frightfully radical ass”.
- Keynes viewed his ideas as responsible for the moral decay of modern civilization.
- Oakeshott acknowledged Bentham as a reformer but dismissed his significance as a thinker.
- Emerson called his philosophy “stinking”.
- Schumpeter considered his ideas the “shallowest of all philosophies of life”.
- J.S. Mill described Bentham as a “boy” who never matured.
- Marx labeled him “the arch-philistine” and a representative of bourgeois intelligence.
- Nietzsche mocked him with a verse: “Soul of washrag; face of poker” and criticized his mediocrity.
- Leon Trotsky referred to utilitarianism as a “social cookbook recipe philosophy”.