Читать книгу Bentham - Michael Quinn - Страница 8

Bentham was a prolific writer but positively awful at bringing his writings into publishable form, with the result that at his death he left some 70,000 pages of manuscript, most of which is now held by UCL special collections. The reputation he gained in Europe and America as an important thinker on law and politics was owed to the simplified recensions of his manuscripts edited in French by the Genevan Étienne Dumont (see Blamires, 2008), especially Traités de législation civile et pénale (1802). In Britain, for well over a century Bentham’s writings were available largely through the inadequate edition of his works overseen by John Bowring (1843), large parts of which were retranslations of Dumont’s recensions. In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established at UCL to oversee a critical edition of Bentham’s writings, and the first volume was published in 1968. Thus far, thirty-four of a projected eighty volumes have appeared, so that there remains much to come.

Until relatively recently any influence that Bentham had, other than through direct contact, was exercised by what Lieberman calls ‘the historical Bentham’ (1999), that is the one known through the works he did publish and the editions of Dumont and Bowring. The vision informing the work of the Bentham Project is to make available a more ‘authentic’ Bentham, derived from scholarly editing of both published writings and manuscript sources. Of course, no edition can ever be unproblematically authentic: the authentic Bentham died in 1832. Every editor constructing a text brings with them their own conscious or unconscious presuppositions and biases, while putting a Bentham volume together requires countless decisions, great and small, which impact on both shape and content. That said, the effort to assemble texts by studying the evidence of their origin and development, and attempting to realize what the editor takes to be Bentham’s most developed intentions in regard to their presentation, must be the right approach.

Finally, it would be a dereliction of duty not to advertise the opportunity for everyone to try their hand at reading Bentham’s hand and contribute to the completion of a major and perennially under-funded research project through the Project’s ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiative. Those interested should visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/transcribe-bentham