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On 15 February 1748 Alicia Bentham (née Grove) gave birth to her first child Jeremy in Houndsditch in East London. Alicia had six more children over the next nine years, of whom only the last, Samuel (1757–1831), survived infancy. Bentham’s lifetime witnessed massive historical changes, beginning two years after the last pitched battle on British soil, ending as the Great Reform Bill passed, and taking in not only the American and French Revolutions, but the transformation of Britain into the first industrial economy. His childhood was prosperous, but not emotionally warm, especially after his mother’s death in 1759. He was prodigiously gifted, reading fluently by the age of three, and his father Jeremiah, a successful lawyer and property speculator, fed his cognitive development, hoping that he would one day rise to legal eminence.

Jeremy was taught Latin, Greek, French, music and art, though for a philosopher of pleasure his childhood seems to have been rather ascetic, since he was forbidden books offering mere ‘amusement’, as unsuitable for children (1843: x. 21). His parents were religiously and politically conservative; devotion to religious practice and principles was emphasized. Late in life Bentham recalled that his childhood had been blighted by fear of the supernatural, exacerbated by servants who tormented him with tales of malign spirits inhabiting the toilet at his grandmother’s house (1843: x. 18–19). He had very limited contact with children of his own age before arriving at the exclusive Westminster School in 1755 (1843: x. 14), where he was bullied for his small stature and his intelligence. Dutifully, he tried to satisfy parental expectations, but his childhood must have been a lonely one, alleviated by extended summer visits to his grandmothers in Hampshire and Essex, where the atmosphere was less intense, and he could develop his lifelong interests in nature and science.

In 1760 Bentham, aged twelve, was enrolled at Oxford University, receiving his BA in 1763. His life at Oxford continued lonely, unstimulating and, thanks to Jeremiah’s parsimony, impecunious. In order to graduate, scholars were required to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, and the young Bentham, viewing them as a series of statements combining obvious falsehoods with contradictory or meaningless prescriptions, but aware that failure to subscribe would shatter his father’s ambitions for him, sacrificed his integrity to that ambition and swore the self-consciously perjurious oath with a sense of intellectual betrayal the bitter memory of which lingered for the rest of his life (2011a: 35–6).

Bentham’s father rented lodgings for him in Lincoln’s Inn and provided a rental income of £100 a year. For a while, he continued ploughing the furrow set before him, attending the courts in Westminster Hall and pursuing the path to qualify as a barrister, before being called to the bar as he came of age in 1769. By then, however, two things had changed. First, Bentham had returned to Oxford to hear the lectures on jurisprudence given by William Blackstone, Vinerian Professor of Law, and decided that English law as it existed, as delivered by Blackstone and witnessed in Westminster Hall, did not make sense: it was, strictly speaking, incomprehensible. The epigraph to this chapter comes from a much later indictment of Common Law in just these terms. Second, he had exploited his relative independence to read the leading authors of the Enlightenment, and enthusiastically adopted their ambition to substitute science for superstition in all areas, especially morality and law. Helvétius (1759), Beccaria (1995) and Hume (2007), who all aspired to establish morality on a scientific footing, were authors who particularly inspired him.¹ Having reached his majority, Bentham concluded that his particular genius and mission was not to practise law but to establish its foundation on a rational basis (1843: x. 27). To do so, he began to develop the ontology and epistemology presented in § 2 of this chapter.

Bentham’s decision to abandon the practice of law and the prospects it offered did not please Jeremiah, and their relationship, while courteous, remained strained. He was however, and remained, close to his brother, encouraging his interest in science, doing what he could to assist him in establishing his own career, and expressing the affection he himself, he perhaps felt, had been denied. Another important relationship for Bentham was with John Lind, a decade older and much more worldly wise, who was acting as unofficial agent for the King of Poland in London. Bentham had met Lind at Oxford, and after Lind’s return to London in 1773 the two became, at the least, intimate friends, co-operating in writing in support of the British government in relation to the growing crisis in its American colonies.²

In 1776 Bentham’s A Fragment on Government – an offshoot of a larger critique of Blackstone only published in the twentieth century (1977) – was published anonymously. Fragment followed Hume in rejecting the social contract as the basis of governmental authority, and identified ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ as the standard of right and wrong (1977: 393). There was considerable speculation over its author’s identity, which abated along with its sales when Jeremiah, unable to contain his pride in its success, disclosed Bentham’s authorship. One approving reader was the Earl of Shelburne, a powerful Whig politician, soon briefly to lead the British government, who sought Bentham out in 1780 and invited him to spend the next summer at his country seat. Shelburne, who had encouraged Richard Price and Joseph Priestley among other aspiring thinkers, and controlled several seats in the House of Commons, remained close to Bentham for over a decade. Through Shelburne, Bentham gained access to circles of privilege and power, meeting the young William Pitt, who failed to impress him (1843: x. 119), and the reforming lawyer Samuel Romilly, who became a long-term friend and confidant. The most significant contact for Bentham’s future reputation was Étienne Dumont, a Genevan refugee who would be responsible, through abbreviated and accessible recensions of Bentham’s writings, for making him known in Europe and the Americas as a legal theorist.

In the 1770s Bentham began developing the linguistic tools necessary to exchange sense in discussion of law, and decided that only codified, written law, could remedy the deficiencies of judge-made Common Law, under which no one could be sure what the law was until the judge pronounced it. Common Law was ‘incognoscible’, unknowable, making a mockery of law’s action-guiding purpose. Each judgment being specific to a particular case, no one could be sure that it would be held relevant in apparently similar future cases. Judges interpreted law as they pleased, sometimes relying strictly on precedent, sometimes on personal moral intuitions, so that it was inconsistent and arbitrary. Since only lawsuits gave rise to judgments, it was also radically incomplete. Bentham undertook the task of setting out principles underlying a pannomion or complete code of law. Following Beccaria, and responding to growing willingness on the part of rulers to rationalize and codify state-inflicted punishments, he focused initially on penal law (de Champs, 2015: 55–69). By 1780, he had largely printed An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1996) (henceforth IPML), where this focus is evident (Ch. 3), but is prefaced by discussion of human psychology and presentation of the principle of utility as the only rational foundation for both morality and law (Ch. 2). In 1782, he developed his ‘logic of the will’ (see 2010b: 115–18), a form of deontic logic effectively reinvented in the twentieth century. In the next years, he began writing self-consciously for a European audience, using French in the effort to make his intended ‘Projet d’un code de loix détaillé et complet, à l’usage d’un état quelconque’ accessible to European sovereigns, and especially Catherine the Great, who had indicated her desire to codify Russian law (de Champs, 2014: 185–94).

In 1785 Bentham travelled to Russia to join his brother Samuel, who had secured employment with Prince Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite. He remained there until late 1787, but never made the approach to Catherine. He reacted enthusiastically to Samuel’s invention of the panopticon principle, and wrote a short work extolling its application wherever supervision was required (Ch. 6). A report that the British government, now headed by Pitt, planned to reduce the legal rate of interest prompted Bentham to write Defence of Usury (2016a: 43–121), arguing that Adam Smith had been wrong to defend legal limitations of interest rates, which often presented an insuperable obstacle to innovation by making it impossible for borrower and lender to agree on distributing the additional risks and returns of new enterprises.

Bentham returned to London early in 1788 and in 1789, buoyed by the positive reception of Defence of Usury, published IPML which, however, made hardly a ripple. At the behest partly of Shelburne, now Marquess of Landsdowne, and motivated partly by his own sympathy for Russia, which had been attacked by Sweden, Bentham wrote to the press castigating Pitt’s foreign policy, and made plans for a never-realized work on international law, including a plan for a European tribunal to settle disputes (see 2016a: liii–lix; 1843: ii. 535–60; and Ch. 8). In 1790, preparation for a new edition of Defence of Usury prompted his first effort to write a handbook of political economy (2016a: 165–214). In parallel, encouraged by the Irish administration, Bentham drafted two lengthy ‘Postscripts’ to the Panopticon, and all three were printed, but not published, in Dublin and London (1843: iv. 37–172). However, no official invitation arrived, and Bentham instead attempted, with no small success, to promote the plan to influential parties in England (Blamires, 2008: 57–62, 66–73).

In 1792, Bentham’s father died, and Bentham inherited his estate, including the house on the edge of St James’s Park which would be home for the rest of his life. The Bentham brothers, reunited by Samuel’s return to London in 1791, had by July 1793 succeeded in convincing the British government of the virtues of both the panopticon penitentiary and contracting with them to build and manage it (1981: 22–3). With their new wealth they began to stockpile construction materials. Bentham was, as Blamires argues (2008: 16–17, 39, 42), committed to seizing the opportunity to model a successful utilitarian institution, likely hoping to combine this with continued writing on law, since he anticipated that, once established, the prison would operate like clockwork (2010a: 349–51). He spent much time over the next ten years in a doomed attempt to hold the administration to its word (Semple, 1993; Blamires, 2008: 56–94).

A further prospect for the adoption of the panopticon had been opened by the developing crisis in France. Dumont was now there, effectively working as a publicist for the Comte de Mirabeau, a leading figure early in the revolution. Bentham sought to exploit the suddenly fluid political order to suggest wide-ranging reforms in organization of courts, parliamentary procedure, prisons, political economy and, finally, constitutional law. Briefly, he planned to advocate a massive extension of the franchise in England, but the violent turn of events in France made him an opponent of electoral reform at home for fear of empowering ignorance (see Ch. 7: 135–6). Ironically, just as violence erupted in Paris in August 1792, he was accorded honorary citizenship by the Legislative Assembly. In 1794, he reviewed possible sources of government finance (2019a: 151–262), and developed a proposal devised ten years earlier to generate revenue painlessly by escheat to the state of half the value of estates of those dying childless (2019a: 1–149). Between 1796 and 1798 he developed a plan for provision of poor relief by a National Charity Company, to replace the patchwork of parish authorities holding responsibility under the existing system (2001; 2010a).

In 1799, Bentham finally took possession of a site for the panopticon prison, but the nimbyism of the powerful continued to frustrate attempts to build it. Meanwhile, suspension of payment in specie by the Bank of England in February 1797 prompted him to investigate the supply of credit, and three years’ work produced a detailed proposal for the issue of interest-bearing currency ([2019b]) and a second attempt to distil political economy into a handbook ([2019c5–8]). When Pitt resigned in 1801 Bentham engaged with the new administration, attempting to persuade it of the merits of his currency and of fulfilling the previous administration’s commitment to the prison.

After the definitive rejection of the panopticon plan in 1803, Bentham began drafting the massive, and massively influential, work on evidence edited in 1827 by the young J.S. Mill (1843: vi. 189–585 and vii. 1–598). This work, closely related to his work on logic and justified belief, will not receive detailed attention in this book, but has been insightfully analysed elsewhere (Twining, 1985; 2019; Riley, [2018]). In 1806 he began drafting ‘Scotch Reform’, including a contrast between ‘natural’ arrangement of legal procedure and the existing ‘technical’ arrangement, which was comprehensible, if at all, only to lawyers (1843: v. 1–54), who Bentham was now convinced shared a sinister interest in maximizing their own opulence at the expense of the public. By 1809, the political elite and the King, the ‘Corrupter General’, had been added to the collective ruling few, and a newly democratic Bentham drafted ‘Plan of Parliamentary Reform’, which was finally published in 1817 (1843: iii. 433–552).

In the second decade of the new century, Bentham added the final element to ‘the ruling few’ in the form of the established Church. Over the next decade, he first convicted the Church of England of fostering ignorance and intellectual submission on the part of the populace (2011a), and then expanded his assault to include organized religion in general, especially in Christian form, or ‘Juggernaut’ as he called it. To avoid prosecution, the parts of that assault edited by George Grote (1822) and Francis Place (1823) appeared pseudonymously. The bulk of the assault remains unpublished, although the Bentham Project has made a start on producing it ([2013]; 2014). In the explosive final volume of ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’, Bentham reprised an argument he had made in analysis of penal law in the 1780s (1978), that consensual homosexual sex was a harmless activity, which should not be punished. He went on to argue that contraception, abortion, suicide, and infanticide by mothers should also be permitted ([2013]: 28–56, 59–7, 68–76), and that Jesus himself had probably indulged in gay sex ([2013]: 177–97). He initially proposed an ‘all-comprehensive liberty for all forms of sexual gratification not predominantly noxious’, but, in deference to homophobic public opinion, ended by proposing the replacement of hanging by banishment (2014: 140, 142). Ironically, much of this material was drafted at Forde Abbey in Somerset, the country retreat that he was able to lease for long periods between 1814 and 1818 thanks to the £23,000 he had received in compensation for the abandonment of the panopticon scheme.

In parallel with these works, Bentham substantially redrafted his writings on logic (1997; 1843: viii. 214–357) and composed major works on the detection of political lying (essential in a representative system) (2015), education (1983c) and private ethics (1983b). He also began a campaign to exploit the international reputation he had acquired from the success of Dumont’s recension Traités de législation civile et pénale – translated into several languages and selling 50,000 copies across Europe by 1830 – by offering his services to various governments to codify their laws. He began with the United States in 1811, and responded to President Madison’s tardy refusal by writing severally to state Governors. In 1814 he hoped that Alexander I of Russia might prove amenable, but was again frustrated. Revolutions in Spain and Portugal in 1820 prompted new hopes and new writings (1995; 2012), and he published Codification Proposal, addressed to ‘all nations professing liberal opinions’, in 1822 (1998), when the Portuguese finally supplied the longed-for invitation to draft civil, penal and constitutional codes. Bentham immediately began work on the massive Constitutional Code, which, with various preparatory essays (1989; 1993), occupied the last decade of his life. He continued corresponding with and writing for leaders or aspirant leaders in Tripoli and Greece (1990) and the now independent Spanish colonies in South America, encouraging them to adopt his ideas. The first volume of Constitutional Code was printed in 1827 and published in 1830 (1983a), but the remaining volumes appeared only in the edition of his works published after his death (1843 ix. 333–647).

In relation to British politics, Bentham cultivated powerful politicians who had given indications of pursuing legal reform, including Robert Peel and Henry Brougham. Both were finally condemned as mere tinkerers, recoiling from systematic reform (1993: 157–202; Riley, 2020). Far from being the ‘hermit’ of his own projection, he was unremittingly active in the world of affairs. As detailed by both Dinwiddy (1989: 16–19) and Crimmins (2004: 9–10; 2011: 157–78), he entertained a succession of dinner guests and turned his house into a centre for discussion of radical reform, viewing himself as unofficial leader of radicals in the Commons. One divisive personal influence was John Bowring, viewed by many of Bentham’s friends and supporters as an untrustworthy intellectual lightweight, who had succeeded by relentless flattery and adulation in turning the old man’s head until no criticism of him could be endured. The result was a self-conscious distancing by some of his closest friends and allies, including both Mills.

Bentham died on 6 June 1832, the day after the passage of the Act which ended the worst of Britain’s electoral abuses and set it on the path to representative democracy. He had committed his corpse to dissection for the benefit of medical science in his first will, made in 1769, and it was publicly dissected by his doctor, Thomas Southwood Smith, three days after his death. In accordance with Bentham’s instructions his skeleton, surmounted by a wax likeness of his head,³ padded with straw and dressed in his clothes, took up residence with Smith, before moving to UCL in 1850. Smith had written an article in the Westminster Review, the radical periodical established with Bentham’s financial backing in 1823, on the uses of the dead to the living, arguing that the medical progress was being obstructed by lack of bodies for dissection. Under English law, dissection served as an additional deterrent to the crime of murder, while Christian orthodoxy demanded the interment of an integral corpse to facilitate eventual resurrection. Late in life Bentham wrote ‘Auto-Icon, or Farther Uses of the dead to the living’ (Crimmins, 2002), taking one last opportunity to ridicule lawyers and the Church, and providing considerable evidence of intellectual vanity. Two points might be made: first, ‘Auto-Icon’ constitutes the last salvo in Bentham’s long anti-clerical campaign in favour of a materialist view of the world. A corpse was simply a physical object like any other, and no longer the site of sensations, good or bad. As such, its only immediate use was to facilitate medical instruction. Second, if suitably preserved, it might provide opportunities for recalling happy memories on one hand, and, more importantly, for moral and political learning on the other. He anticipated that auto-icons of political leaders might be transferred from a ‘hall of fame’ to a ‘hall of infamy’ according to the ongoing judgments of public opinion. Educational debates might be undertaken by auto-icons of figures on either side of a controversy, with voices supplied by actors and gestures by transforming the auto-icons into giant puppets. Bentham, of course, imagined that his auto-icon would feature heavily in such debates, while the drama would add to the attraction and the effect, thus opening a new avenue of indirect legislation (see Ch. 4).