"Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by playing on a fine old organ, and has a relish for Hogarth's prints. He turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner."7

Bentham is to be compared to William Godwin: they resembled one another in their "blind contempt for the past." While each preached the need for nonviolent revolution, each had a different following. Bentham's revolution was to be effected by legislation, Godwin's by argument.

Jeremy Bentham was critical of the approach taken by Blackstone in his Commentaries (1765-9). Commentaries was written by Blackstone (university teacher; lawyer; and, in time, a judge); he meant it to be a concise and clear statement of the common law, ordered and elucidated, to be used by the busy practitioner. Bentham thought it deficient, as it did not consider the social impact of the law (however, I should say here, that it was not Blackstone's purpose to make any statement about the consequences of the law, one way or the other; Blackstone was not a law reformer.)

It was in his book,8 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham strove "to cut a new road through the wilds of jurisprudence." In it he was to develop the idea that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should govern our judgment of every institution and action.9 This simplified view, viz., we proceed with legislative action which will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number, was, apparently, to be the only extent of Bentham's thought. Jeremy Bentham was not, according to William Hazlitt, an original thinker; he was, a compiler.

"But Mr. Bentham's forte is arrangement; and the form of truth, though not its essence, varies with time and circumstance. He has methodized, collated, and condensed all the materials prepared to his hand on the subject of which he treats, in a masterly and scientific manner; but we should find a difficulty in adducing from his different works (however elaborate or closely reasoned) any new element of thought, or even a few fact or illustration. His writing are, therefore, chiefly valuable as books of reference, as bringing down the account of intellectual inquiry to the present period, and disposing the results in a compendious, connected, and tangible shape; but books of reference are chiefly serviceable for facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, and are constantly liable to be superseded and to grow out of fashion with its progress, as the scaffolding is thrown down as soon as the building is completed.
"...
"There is a technicality of manner, which renders his writings of more value to the professional inquirer than to the general reader. Again, his style is unpopular, not to say unintelligible. He writes a language of his own that darkens knowledge. His works have been translated into French - they ought to be translated into English. People wonder that Mr. Bentham has not been prosecuted for the boldness and severity of some of his invectives. He might wrap up high treason in one of his inextricable periods, and it would never find its way into Westminster Hall. He is a kind of Manuscript author - he writes a cypher-hand, which the vulgar have no key to. The construction of his sentences is a curious frame-work with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of everybody else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin; and what makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you could."10

"... a very powerful influence in the political and legal sphere, but that as a thinker he was not very original, not even very profound, a trifle confused on ultimate philosophical issues and prone to over simplify complex problems ... pedantic and opinionated systematizer, overrated by his radical contemporaries ..."11

"Mr. Bentham is long; Mr. Bentham is occasionally involved and obscure; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming expressions; Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision - and he loves method itself, more than its consequences."13

We have already referred to Hazlitt and Hazlitt's views on Bentham as a writer; what did Hazlitt think of Bentham's view of legislation and its place in the guidance of men's activity:

"The gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the constitution of his mind will scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to consequences: if we consider the criminal man (with whom the legislator has chiefly to do), it will be found to be still less so."14

"Mr Bentham, in adjusting the provisions of a penal code, lays too little stress on the co-operation of the natural prejudices of mankind ... The laws of the country are therefore ineffectual and abortive, because they are made by the rich for the poor, by the wise for the ignorant, by the respectable and exalted in station for the very scum and refuse of the community."15

"You tell a person [a drunk, an idler, a gambler, a culprit, or a criminal] of this stamp what is his interest; he says he does not care about his interest, or the world and he differ on that particular. But there is one point on which he must agree with them, namely, what they think of his conduct, and that is the only hold you have of him. A man may be callous and indifferent to what happens to himself; but he is never indifferent to public opinion or proof against open scorn and infamy.
Shame, then, not fear, is the sheet-anchor of the law ... It is the apprehension of being stigmatized by public opinion, the fear of what will be thought and said of them, that deters men from the violation of the laws, while their character remains unimpeached; but honour once lost, all is lost. The man can never be himself again! A citizen is like a soldier, a part of a machine, who submits to certain hardships, privations, and dangers, not for his own ease, pleasure, profit, or even conscience, but - for shame."16

[TOP]
[TOC]
Conclusions:-

While he did much to lay the ground work for the English legislative reform which was to take place in the 19th century, Bentham's conclusions on how law came about, his lack of understanding of the process which was more fully understood subsequent to his passing (Darwinian evolution), led his followers, in subsequent years, to apply unworkable positive law to the problems of social and industrial development. The fact is that no one mind, no group of minds in a collective, can devise laws for society, and certainly not within a single human generation. Jeremy Bentham was right to this extent: we are capable and it is right that we continue to examine the reasons for the various happy and sad conditions of man; and, in certain limited circumstances, we should pass restrictive laws to better guide the natural development of the voluntary rules which are part of that which we know as natural law.19

_______________________________

A featured sketch in a book

NOW AVAILABLE

Biographical Sketches: The Thinkers

_______________________________

Found this material Helpful?

_______________________________

1748:
§ Bentham is Born.
§ David Hume writes Human Understanding.

1749:
§ Henry Fielding is writing Tom Jones.

1750:
§ Dr. Johnson is busy writing his dictionary.

1754:
§ The start of The Seven Years War.

1756:
§ Edmund Burke published A Vindication of Natural Society.

1759:
§ The British Conquest of America.

1760:
§ Twelve year old Bentham enters Oxford University.

1763:
§ End of The Seven Years War and the signing of The Treaty Of Paris.
§ Lord Shelburne (1737-1805), an alumnus of Oxford, an army officer, a parliamentarian, and, who, was to become a powerful supporter of Bentham, is appointed the president of the Board of Trade (a very important position in those days).

1765:
§ The Stamp Act is passed by the British parliament.

1767:
§ Voltaire dies.

1769:
§ At around this time, Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) brings out his Commentaries on the Law of England.

1770:
§ The members of the "Long Parliament" take their seats, it sat for 15 years, until 1785.

1772:
§ Having studied at Lincoln's Inn since 1763, Bentham is called to the bar.

1775:
§ Edmund Burke brings out On Conciliation with the American Colonies.

1776:
§ July 2nd, 1776, the Continental Congress carries a motion for the independence of the 13 states on the East coast of America. Two days later the Declaration of Independence is adopted.
§ Edward Gibbon gives forth with his first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
§ David Hume dies.
§ Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is published.
§ Bentham's work, A Fragment on Government comes out.

1781:
§ British troops under Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown.

1783:
§ December 13th, penal laws against Roman Catholics repealed.
§ British evacuate New York.

1785:
§ The Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution occurs in England, when, for the first time, steam engines are used to power spinning machinery.
§ Bentham, in his travels around the continent, visits Russia, (1785-88).20

1789:
§ Bentham brings out his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

1790:
§ Burke writes Reflections on the French Revolution.

1792:
§ Paine's reply, The Rights of Man.
§ September massacres in Paris.

1793:
§ In January Louis XVI is beheaded.
§ Godwin's Political Justice appears.
§ The trials of the "Reform-martyrs," Muir and Palmer who were subsequently transported to Botany Bay; this was part of the larger government effort to prosecute editors, nonconformists and radicals who were arguing for Parliamentary reform.

1794:
§ A simple device for separating cotton lint from seeds is patented by Eli Whitney.

1796:
§ Edward Jenner discovers the prophylactic power of vaccination.

1797:
§ In January, with Bonaparte having successfully invaded Italy and Spain coming in on the side of France, Britain withdrew her ships from the Mediterranean, which was to become a "French Lake" from January 1797 to May 1798.

1798:
§ Malthus brings out his Essay on the "Principle of Population."
§ Coleridge and Wordsworth bring out Lyrical Ballads.
§ Nelson re-enters the Mediterranean in May, 1798, and destroys Napoleon's fleet.

1802:
§ The Treaty of Amiens is signed and the war between France and England is ended leaving France supreme in Western Europe and England supreme on the oceans of the world.

1803:
§ Malthus brings out the second edition of his Essay on the "Principle of Population."

1804:
§ War between Britain and Bonaparte-dominated Spain breaks out on December 12th, 1804.
§ Napoleon becomes emperor of France.

1805:
§ In 1805, Trevithick adapts the Watt engine to a vehicle, and the locomotive comes into being. By the middle of the century a network of railways had spread all over Europe.
§ Nelson's victory at Trafalgar.

1806:
§ In 1806 England abolishes the slave-trade (in 1833 slavery itself).

1807:
§ Fulton's first steam boat.

1808:
§ In support of a Spanish rising, in July, Arthur Wellesley (later to become known as the Duke of Wellington) leads the first small British force of 9000 men into the Peninsula of Spain; a gate into the hostile fortress of Napoleonic Europe.
§ Bentham meets James Mill.

1811:
§ Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
§ The English Parliament passes an anti-slave trade bill and the 1811 Felony Act becomes law, and it killed the slave trade dead.21

1812:
§ On 18 June, 1812, President Madison and the American Congress declares war on Britain.

1813:
§ It was during the winter that the news came of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow and his struggle to retain hold of central Europe.
§ In England, 13 "Luddites" are hung at the York Assizes.

1815:
§ June 18th, 1815, the Battle of Waterloo.

1817:
§ Ricardo's, Principles of Political Economy & Taxation.
§ Habeas Corpus is suspended as the war against the Radical Press in England heats up.

1819:
§ "Peterloo:" On August 16th, 1819, "an orderly and unarmed crowed of about 60,000 men, women and children" assemble in support of universal suffrage, in St. Peter's Fields, Manchester. They were there to hear the speaker, Radical Hunt. The magistrates, in a move to arrest the speaker, order the cavalry in: "eleven persons, including two women, were killed or died of their injuries; over a hundred were wounded by sabres and several hundred more injured by horse-hoofs or crushed in the stampede." (G. M. Trevelyan's, British History in the Nineteenth Century, p. 189.)
§ Keats, Hyperion; Shelley, Promethus Unbound.
§ A Factory Bill prohibiting children under the age of nine to work in cotton mills is passed in 1819; this is the first of a series of parliamentary bills which were to be passed over the next forty years in a process of law reform which was first prompted by the writings of Jeremy Bentham.

1821:
§ Michael Faraday (1791-1867) discovers electromagnetic induction.

1822:
§ Shelley dies.

1824:
§ Lord Byron dies.

1825:
§ The first railway opens in the northern part of England, between Stockton and Darlinton; Stephenson's "Rocket," with a thirteen ton train, gets up a speed of 44 miles per hour.

1827:
§ On 27th March, 1827, Darwin gives a short talk to the Plinian Society, and communicates two discoveries which he has made: First, "that the ova of the Flustra posses organs of motion; and the second, that the small black globular body hitherto mistaken for the young Fucus Lorius [a seaweed], is in reality the ovum of the pontobdella muricata [a leech that infests skates]. At the request of the society he promised to draw up an account of the facts and to lay it, together with specimens, before the Society next evening."22

1828:
§ Wm. Cobbett and Richard Carlile put on trial for articles in the Press; Cobbett, at least, was acquitted.

1832:
§ Darwin sails on the Beagle.
§ The Great Reform Bill.
§ Bentham dies.

_______________________________

Found this material Helpful?

_______________________________

[TOC]
Quotes:-

(All are from Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789.]

Consistency:-
§ "The rarest of all human qualities is consistency." (i., 12.)

Dread Of Evil & The Hope Of Good:-
§ "It was the dread of evil, not the hope of good that first cemented societies together." (xviii., 17 note.)

Government:-
§ "The business of government is to promote the happiness of the society by punishing and rewarding." (vii., 1.)

Passion:-
§ "During the first assault of passion as under a thunder stroke the sentiments of virtue may yield for a moment." (xiii., 4.)

Punishment:-
§ "With what chance of success for example would a legislator go about, to extirpate drunkenness by dint of legal punishment?" (xix., 15.)
§ "The State has two great engines, punishment and reward." (xviii., 18.)
§ "With what chance of success would a legislator go about to extirpate drunkenness by dint of legal punishment?" (xix., 15.)
§ "Punishment cannot act any farther than in as far as the idea of it is present in the mind." (xvii., 7.)
§ "Force can accomplish many things which would be beyond the reach of cunning." (xiii., 2.)

Sanctions:-
§ "There are four distinguishable sources from which pleasure and pain are in use to flow: considered separately, they may be termed the physical, the political, the moral, and the religious: and inasmuch as the pleasures and pains belonging to each of them are capable of giving a binding force to any law or rule of conduct, they may all of them be termed sanctions." (iii., 2.)

Utilitarianism:-
§ "Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men's actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness." (xix., 11.)
§ "An action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it." (i., p. iii.)

_______________________________

[TOP]
[TOC]
NOTES:

¹ See C. K. Ogden's introduction to Bentham's work, The Theory of Legislation (1789) (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner; 1931).

² According to Augustine Birrell, Bentham had an "abhorrence of attorneys and our absurd juridical system." [See Birrell's William Hazlitt (1902) (London: MacMillan, 1902) at p. 93.]

³ My copy: Oxford University Press, 1951.

⁴ However, John Stuart Mill, in his autobiography was to write: "The notion that Bentham was surrounded by a band of disciples who received their opinions from his lips, is a fable ... The influence which Bentham exercised was by his writings."

⁵ As a founder of University College at London, Bentham's skeleton is there, I understand, at the University, preserved, dressed up in his clothes.

⁶ Hazlitt's essay, "Jeremy Bentham," being one of a compilation of his essays published in a book, in 1825, The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt rented his house (19 York Street, Westminster) and rented it from Bentham; and, Bentham lived "in a mansion with a large garden just behind." (See Birrell's William Hazlitt, op. cit., p. 93.)

⁷ Hazlitt's "Jeremy Bentham," op. cit..

⁸ My soft covered copy came from Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988.

⁹ Compare the utiltarian theory with the views of the great 20th century philosopher, Karl Popper. In his work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper suggests what the guiding public policy should be: "Minimize avoidable suffering," this in contradistinction to the Utilitarian maxim, "Maximize happiness."

¹⁰ Hazlitt's essay, "Jeremy Bentham."

¹¹ See pp. x-xi of Ogden's introduction to Bentham's work, The Theory of Legislation, op. cit.

¹² Sydney Smith (1771-1845), with Jeffrey, Horner & Brougham, founded the Edinburgh Review. Smith was of the view that there "are a vast number of absurd and mischievous fallacies, which pass readily in the world for sense and virtue while in truth they tend only to fortify error and encourage crime." With thoughts like this we can readily see that Smith was a reformer of the Bentham bent. [See Smith's "Fallacies of Anti-Reformers" (1824).]

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Hazlitt's essay, "Jeremy Bentham."

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Beginning with Sir Thomas More's (1478-1535) Utopia.

¹⁸ Hazlitt's essay, "Jeremy Bentham."

¹⁹ It was in his Principles of Legislation (1780) that Bentham thought: "Instead of the phrase, Law of Nature, you have sometimes Law of Reason." A statement, which betrays, of course, a complete misunderstanding of the notion, natural law.

²⁰ See Chambers.

²¹ Johnson, p. 325.

²² The Minutes of the Plinian Society.