Jeremy Bentham Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), inventor of the term international, was one of the greatest political and legal philosophers of his time. As the founder of utilitarianism, he has remained a controversial figure in the history of political thought, subject to much praise and criticism at once. His greatest follower, John Stuart Mill, described him as a “one-eyed man who offered philosophy a new method of analysis,” while his most notable critic, Karl Marx, referred to him as an “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century.” Whether or not they approved of his views, none of the influential political thinkers of the last two centuries could afford to ignore this great philosopher.

Born in London, Bentham was the son of a wealthy lawyer. He too studied law but never practiced it, preferring instead to focus on law “as it ought to be.” He remained a committed advocate of judicial and political reform throughout his life. His Panopticon project, for example, is among the most innovative prison reform proposals of all time. His persistent criticism of and elaboration on “political fallacies” was intended to pave the way for meaningful political reform. Bentham’s normative views were distinctively secular on the one hand and grounded on an exploration of existing practice on the other. During the American and French revolutions, he rejected the idea of natural rights. Bentham’s thought is frequently associated with legal positivism.

Bentham is most famous (and notorious) for his concept of “utility” aimed at calculating and, by implication, manipulating human motivations. For him, it is possible to rank order the motives for human action according to their preeminence. “Purely social” motives are morally best, followed by semi social, asocial, and dissocial motives. Asocial motives (i.e., self-interest) are the most common, uniform, and powerful, followed by semi social, purely social, and dissocial motives. Every human action, in Bentham’s view, is ultimately motivated by a desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Even when one acts benevolently toward another, one does so because one finds pleasure in helping the other person. Ultimately, for Bentham, the degree of pleasure is calculable through the use of such variables as intensity, duration, or extent—a principle known as felicific calculus. Taken together, these ideas led Bentham to systematize his famous normative agenda: “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

Bentham published his most well-known concise treatment of utility, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in 1789. He was a prolific yet somewhat disorganized writer, with a crowded intellectual agenda. He never married and reportedly lived an eccentric life. When he died in London in 1832, he left behind some seventy thousand unpublished manuscript pages contained in some eighty wooden boxes. The first comprehensive collection of Bentham’s works was published posthumously by John Bowring in eleven volumes in 1843.The organization and editing of his original work still continues today under the auspices of the University College London’s Bentham Project.

Bibliography:

Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by John Bowring. Edinburgh, U.K.:William Tait, 1843.
Harrison, Ross. Bentham. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
Hoogensen, Gunhild. International Relations, Security and Jeremy Bentham. London: Routledge, 2005.
Parekh, Bhikhu. Jeremy Bentham:Ten Critical Essays. London: Cass, 1974.
Schofield, Philip. Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Steintrager, James. Bentham. London: Allen and Unwin, 1977.