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To have compleated the junction between interest and duty in every line of human conduct would be neither more nor less than to have brought the science and art of government to perfection – to have established a perfect system of legislation. (2010a: 353)

The Bentham presented in this book is a Bentham who believed that the principle of utility was applicable in all contexts, but whose central focus was on the delivery of good outcomes by public institutions. In other words he was, above all, with Engelmann, a ‘theorist of the art and science of government’ (2017: 71), both in the sense that government was an engineer of the context in which its subjects made choices, and in the sense that the context in which government and its functionaries made choices was in large measure created by the choices of those same subjects. In the current crisis of political liberalism, this approach remains relevant, not to say urgent, across political communities (see Ch. 9: 171–4).

Of course, Bentham does not provide ready-made solutions to the problems that beset modern society, but he does provide a method of framing them that is as relevant now as when first developed. His chosen instrument was law, understood in a very broad sense, and relying on public knowledge and general endorsement (or at least the absence of general resistance) for its effectiveness. His investigations took him in many directions, often sparked by the political salience of particular problems, and his ideas on central issues, especially representative democracy, changed radically. That said, his central frame, based on the combination of two elements, never varied. Those elements were first, the explanation of events and the recommendation of policies on the basis of a belief in the motivational power of self-preference; and second, the evaluation of actions, laws and policies on the basis of their impact on the happiness of those affected by them. If happiness remains valuable, the study of Bentham has much to offer.

It is true to say that once launched on the study of a topic, Bentham followed where the logic of his argument led him, regardless of the popularity of particular conclusions (see Schofield, 2009: 18). In this he is in one way a quintessential Enlightenment rationalist, with a strong belief in the powers of human reason to improve the condition of mankind. His distinction between the role of the expositor (accurate description of things as they were) and the censor (indication of things as they ought to be) (1977: 397–8) led via John Austin to the development of legal positivism. Schofield (2010) is correct in arguing that for Bentham the role of the expositor was to facilitate that of the censor: description preceded evaluation, but utilitarian evaluation was the goal. The existence of an institution or a practice was not a justification for it, and, at bottom, all practices and institutions required justification. At the same time, his approach was pragmatic: what he sought was real-life solutions capable of working in practice and delivering improvements. He was fond of quoting Francis Bacon’s aphorism ‘Respice finem’ (‘look to the end’), believing that the questions to be asked of any rule or institution were ‘What is it for?’, that is, ‘What is it (or should it be) trying to achieve?’, and ‘Does it achieve its goals with the least possible infliction of pain?’ The questions remain as relevant today as when he first put them.

This book is not an attempt to defend Bentham against his many critics, historical or contemporary. It will argue that there are unresolved tensions in his thought. In particular, he wanted to retain the attractions and advantages of two different, if not contradictory, interpretations of his foundational principle (Chs. 2, 7 and 8), and his attempt to accommodate the value of equality within the principle of utility finessed far too easily the consequences of its consistent sacrifice to security (Ch. 5). Hanna Pitkin entitled an article ‘Slippery Bentham’ (1990) and, for all his self-imposed goal of clarity, he was capable of using an expression in whichever one of plural senses best suited the requirements of the argument he was making. He could be selective in assembling empirical evidence in support of his positions, and he was sometimes as guilty as the rest of us of finessing lacunae or tensions in his arguments. All this is true, but it remains the case – partly indeed because of the tensions in his thought – that familiarity with Bentham’s arguments and conclusions is usually worth the pains of its acquisition.

The early Bentham wrote clearly and even stylishly, but was frustrated by the question-begging, value-laden nature of many of the terms used in moral and political discourse (1983b: 87–98). Ironically, in his effort to develop a vocabulary free from the eulogistic or dyslogistic baggage of that in common use, he was prone to inventing new terms, many of which required lengthy explanation (see Rosen, 1983: 128–9). In addition, the later Bentham especially was so anxious to aid clarity by circumscribing his inferences in chains of qualifications and exceptions that it became hard work to keep track of the sense. William Hazlitt famously said that for Bentham to be read he first required to be translated into English (1894: 18), which was an exaggeration, though even Bentham’s friends could see what he was driving at.

Before outlining the arc of the book in relation to the successive chapters, it may be of use to introduce several features of his thought that will appear repeatedly. First, Bentham explicitly founded his prescriptions on generalizations about the workings of human psychology or ‘axioms of mental pathology’, which effectively suspended all the variables, individual, attitudinal or cultural (in his terms ‘circumstances of sensibility’ (1996: 51–73)), which impacted differentially on human individuals’ experience of pleasures and pains, to make universally applicable statements. Mental pathology relied on ‘knowledge of the feelings, affections, and passions, and their effects upon happiness’, while he considered its axioms relating to ‘the several occurrences by which pleasure or pain is made to have place in the human mind’ as incontestable, comprehensive, and clear (1843: i. 304–5; see also 2011b: 248–9, 266–8). Second, from axioms of mental pathology Bentham derived four subordinate ends of legislation (security, subsistence, abundance and equality) intended to guide the legislator in identifying the most important pleasures and pains and in drafting civil or distributive law (1843: i. 302–26; 2011b: 268–79). The four ends constitute Bentham’s version of objective human interests, together capturing both the central conditions for satisfying or happy lives and, with emphasis on protection of security by law, the source of the ‘essential obligations by means of which society is kept together’ (2011b: 174–5). Third, Bentham approached many problems in terms of two parallel internal discourses: an abstract utility discourse, which set aside particular cultural, religious and social contexts, and made inferences derived from the psychological commonalities shared by human beings as such, and a concrete or sociological discourse, which modified the general conclusions of the abstract discourse in the light of the cultural and social beliefs and practices prevalent in particular contexts (2011b: 174). Since no human life is lived in the abstract, it is the concrete ‘final utility’ discourse that finally determines policy. In Bentham’s terms, axioms of mental pathology have to be accommodated to, or filtered by, circumstances of sensibility, and especially to the prevailing patterns of belief in the contexts in which policies were to be applied (see Quinn, 2014b). Finally, the purpose of law is to guide action, while no voluntary action could occur without the coincidence of three necessary and sufficient conditions: desire or will to perform it, knowledge of how to perform it, and power or capacity to perform it. Law or policy-makers might influence conduct by acting on any or all of these conditions, while their choice between which to target determines the distinction Bentham made between direct and indirect legislation, and informs the development of his multi-faceted strategies for guiding action which extends across the possible field of governmental interventions.

The book begins with a sketch of Bentham’s life and then engages with his logic, which underlies two of his central claims. First, that his logic permitted the substitution of the exchange of sense for the exchange of meaningless cant, literal nonsense, in discussion of morality and law; and second for the superiority of his theory – anchored as it was in the real entities of pleasure and pain – over others. Chapter 2 discusses Bentham’s psychology and theory of motivation, and an apparent tension between it and his moral principle. It argues that if that principle coincided with general benevolence, as he often claimed, when it came to practice in the real world the coincidence was with benevolence in a more limited and negative sense. Bentham’s discussion of competing moral principles is reviewed, and his attitude to the problem of measuring sensations investigated. The book does not address the intricacies of Bentham’s theory of law but, instead, in Chapters 3 and 4 develops his distinction between direct and indirect legislation to open the way to discussion of his applications of the utility principle to public policy, which occupies the remaining chapters. Chapter 5 presents Bentham’s subordinate ends of legislation, and his use of them in setting the normative background for his political economy, of which the goal was the maximization of abundance. Other things being equal, an equal distribution maximized happiness but, given established entitlements and the importance of expectation to happiness, other things were almost never equal, and equality is consistently trumped by security for the expectations actually present in societies riven by deep inequalities in property. Chapter 6 shifts the focus to institutional design, and describes Bentham’s attempts to unite agents’ interest with their duty through architecture, transparency and publicity. The chapter reviews the principles of management developed in his panopticon and poor-law writings in terms of the necessary conditions of voluntary action, before concluding with a discussion of Foucault’s complex interpretation of Bentham. Chapter 7 traces the to-and-fro development of Bentham’s views on representative democracy, before providing a sketch of his design for a system of government that combined the knowledge necessary to rule with continuous responsibility to an informed and critical public opinion. It argues on the one hand that Bentham’s enduring fear of popular ignorance led him to exclude the poor from the exercise of governmental power, and on the other that his indefatigable efforts to expose the exercise of that power to relentless public scrutiny provide lessons from which we might still learn. Chapter 8 attempts to shed light on the tension over the scope of the principle of utility identified in Chapter 2 by discussion of Bentham’s efforts to apply it to international law, which finally rely on the potential appeal of negative benevolence to all states, and to the question of colonies, which combined a radical anti-imperialism with a breath-taking disregard for indigenous peoples. Chapter 9 presents a case for Bentham’s continued relevance in an era of widely perceived crisis in governance, and concludes with an examination of the resources available within his theory for addressing the issue of human-induced climate change.

The focus of this study is Bentham as a theorist of government. Given the breadth and fecundity of his thought, many parts of it will not be directly addressed. Thus, his writings on private ethics, ‘adjective law’ or procedure, religion and fallacies, and his detailed critiques of natural right will be addressed only in passing. Bentham’s default perspective is that of government, of a utilitarian legislator seeking to guide human action by manipulating its necessary conditions. His writings are explorations of methods of influencing human conduct to good ends, and their fundamental tool is analysis of the interaction between human agents facing decisions about what to do on the one hand, and the architecture of choice – the constellation of physical, legal, institutional and normative factors that influence decision-making – on the other, which is to say that Bentham was self-consciously an engineer of choices.

It might be objected that this perspective renders his theory necessarily ‘top down’, with the hapless subjects of law dancing to the legislator’s tune and even, thanks to habitual deference and false consciousness (a term which for Bentham meant the belief that something existed which did not exist (1996: 75)), passively endorsing their manipulation and indeed actively assisting it. Broadly, this is the Foucauldian critique of modernity and of Bentham, whom Foucault described as more important to modern society than either Kant or Hegel (1994: ii. 594). The argument of this book is, crudely, that Foucault was half right. Bentham, even before his transition to political radicalism, was simultaneously a technologist of governmental reason and an exposer of misrule, seeking both to oil the wheels of public power and to render its exercise transparent to the public over whom, and on whose behalf, it was exercised.