Close
Bentham’s Political Economy: ‘Happiness—enjoyment—not money, is or ought to be the ultimate object of the legislator’s care’
By Tim Causer, on 31 December 2019
On 16-17 December 2019 a knowledgeable and eager audience gathered over two days to hear leading scholars in the fields of Bentham Studies, Economics, Political Theory and History of ideas present the first fruits of their research into Bentham’s political economy, and in particular on the preliminary texts of the final three volumes recently made freely available online by the Bentham Project (please see the descriptions below for the relevant links). The conference began with Richard Whatmore (St Andrews) presenting the case that Bentham fitted his characterization of ‘end of Enlightenment’ philosophers. The subsequent lectures (from Marco Guidi (Pisa), Stephen Engelmann (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Annie Cot (Paris I), and papers (from Andy Dennis (City University), Michael Quinn (Bentham Project), Vincent-Emmanuel Mathon, Adrian Walsh (University of New England (Australia)), Benjamin Bourcier (Catholic University of Lille), Anthony Howe (University of East Anglia) and Michael Drolet (Worcester College Oxford) which followed maintained the combination between general theses and skilled textual exegesis established at the outset. The speakers were unanimous in their praise for the new volumes, and the general consensus, eloquently summed up by Annie Cot in her closing lecture, was that the new edition would provide a resource of inestimable value to researchers in the field.
The full two-day programme can be viewed on the conference Eventbrite page.
Dr Michael Quinn
Professor Richard Whatmore (University of St Andrews)
Professor Annie Cot (Paris I)
Overview of the Volumes.
In the mid-1780s Bentham drafted his first sustained discussions of political economy and public finance for ‘Projet Matière’. That discussion is now lost, but the corresponding marginal contents and three related appendices open the volume. The volume continues with Defence of Usury, first published 1787, which established some reputation for Bentham in political economy, and five appendices drafted in 1790 in preparation for the second edition. Next comes ‘Manual of Political Economy’, an introductory handbook which Bentham never finished, and the surviving text of which is supplemented by seven appendices. The final work is ‘A Protest against Law Taxes’, a trenchant critique of the taxation of legal proceedings, and the denial of justice to the poor, printed in 1793, published in 1795, and extended in 1816.
The works contained in this volume, ‘Supply without Burthen’ and ‘Proposals relative to divers modes of Supply’, were drafted by Bentham in 1794 during an intense period of activity in which, under the general heading ‘Πόροι’ (i.e. ‘Resources’), he set out systematically to review possible sources of public revenue. Bentham had long believed that the appropriation of a proportion of the estates of those dying without near relations offered a painless method of raising public revenue, and now developed the proposal in detail. At the end of 1795, prompted by Pitt’s introduction of a tax on collateral successions, Bentham published the précis of the work he had submitted to government, which opens the volume, followed by four Appendices of additional materials. By late September 1794, Bentham envisaged ‘Supply without Burthen’ as the first of a related series of proposals for generating public revenue, which he headed ‘Πόροι’. The remaining proposals ranged from further painless expedients, through taxation with compensatory benefit, to taxation pure and simple. Since Bentham viewed all these proposals as connected elements of a single generic enterprise, the fruits of his labours (excepting the proposal which he did publish, namely ‘Supply without Burthen’) are published together for the first time in the present volume as ‘Proposals relative to divers modes of Supply’. This work is followed by six Appendices which shed further light on Bentham’s approach to raising public revenue, including his first articulation of what would reappear five years later as his Annuity Note Scheme.
Writings on Political Economy Volume III: Preventive Police (forthcoming from the Clarendon Press).
The writings in this volume were composed in 1798–9, when Bentham co-operated with the Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun in his efforts to reform policing. The volume is divided into two parts, reflecting the two Bills which Bentham drafted. Part I. Writings on Marine Police contains Bentham’s first draft of the ‘Thames Police Bill’ and four related works. Part II. Writings on the Police Bill, contains five works written in connection with what Bentham referred to indiscriminately as ‘Police Bill’ and ‘Police Revenue Bill’. Bentham’s police bill connects the prevention of crimes directly with the provision of a revenue to the state, and prompts him to reflect on the intimacy of the ‘alliance’ between police and finance. In his ‘Calendar of Delinquency’, he provides a worked example of the application of the principle of utility to the evaluation of policy, while his advocacy of a ‘Police Gazette’ reveals the extent to which he sought both to disseminate information and to mould opinion.
This volume opens with ‘Political Prospects, or What’s to be done?’ an unfinished pamphlet drafted in October 1798 which sought to allay public alarm over the suspension of convertibility by the Bank of England in February 1797. The volume continues with Bentham’s two letters ‘On the Stock-Note Plan’, Ambrose Weston’s proposal for increasing liquidity by securing paper instruments with existing government annuities, which prompted Bentham to develop his own Annuity Note scheme in 1799–1800. The third work in the volume, ‘Hints, respecting the mode of feeding the Old Sinking Fund in War-time’, drafted in July 1800 in the midst of efforts to complete the Annuity Note scheme, continues the focus on the National Debt. The centre-piece of the volume is formed by ‘Circulating Annuities’ itself, a work Bentham did not complete to his satisfaction before deciding rather to draft and print a précis thereof. The volume includes his surviving draft of the work, the précis or ‘Abstract’, and (probably) seven appendices containing related materials. The volume concludes with ‘Observations by Sir Fred. Morton Eden, (in form of a Letter) on the Annuity Note Plan .^.^. with Counter-Observations by the Author’, which Bentham wrote between late July and early August 1801.
N.B. The text of this volume is still being finalized, but will be made available via ucl.discovery as soon as is practically possible.
The volume will contain Bentham’s final reflections on the merits and drawbacks of paper money (‘Paper Mischief Exposed’ (1800-1), ‘The True Alarm’ (1801), ‘Discussion sur le papier monnaie à propos d’un ouvrage d’H. Thornton’ (1802), ‘Paper money for Spain’ (1819), and ‘Paper and Gold’ (1820): the last three being fragmentary discussions of the function and limits of paper promises), together with ‘Defence of a Maximum’ (1801), wherein Bentham advises government, in a dearth, to cap the price of corn, and ‘Method of an Institute of Political Economy’ (1800–1, 1804), his second attempt to summarize the field of political economy.
‘Felicia’? Jeremy Bentham and the naming of the colony of South Australia
By Tim Causer, on 23 October 2019
Over a period of eleven days in August 1831, the elderly Jeremy Bentham drafted the manuscript of a text entitled ‘Colonization Company Proposal’. This incomplete work was written as a reaction to and a commentary upon the National Colonization Society’s recently-printed ‘Proposal for founding A Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia‘. The National Colonization Society was then seeking to persuade the Colonial Office to agree to its proposal to establish, by the means of a joint-stock company, a free colony run according to the principles of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan of ‘systematic colonization’. This entailed the managed emigration of carefully selected free people, funded by the sale of colonial lands, to a colony where settlement was concentrated and which would be granted powers of self-government as soon as was practicable—in direct contradistinction to the disordered settlement of penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.
It is not uncommon to read claims in the literature that Bentham suggested such a new colony might be named ‘Felicia’ or ‘Felicitania’. For instance, in Age of Reform, 1815-1870 (second ed., 1962) E.L. Woodward noted that ‘if Bentham’s plan of a settlement had been carried out, South Australia might today be called Felicitania’ (p. 384), while in Great Southern Land (2004) Frank Welsh argued that Bentham was not only an enthusiast for the South Australia project, but that the ‘colony should be called “Felicia or Felicitania, or best of all Liberia”‘ (p. 141). Douglas Pike contended in Paradise of Dissent (1957) that Bentham ‘richly deserves a place among the founders of South Australia’ and ‘declared’ that the colony ‘should be called Felicia or Felicitania or, best of all, Liberia’ (p. 57), while the first page of The Flinders History of South Australia (1986) states that Bentham’s suggestion that South Australia might be called ‘either Felicitania or Liberia’ ‘happily reflect[ed] the Utopian idealism and the scientific principles upon which the new community would rise’. Perhaps most notably, the 1981 memoirs of the path-breaking Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, were entitled Felicia—as historian and biographer of Dunstan, Angela Woollacott notes, by harking back to the colony’s radical origins Dunstan had ‘self-consciously adopted’ the ‘sense of reformist exceptionalism woven into the history of South Australia’ (‘Radical Roots in Fiji: the impact of colonialism on Don Dunstan’ in Griffith Review 55: State of Hope (2017))
Felicia: the political memoirs of Don Dunstan (Griffin Press Ltd, 1981)
There is, however, the small matter that Bentham did not in fact suggest these names for the colony—though the coining of innumerable neologisms can be ascribed to Bentham, neither ‘Felicia’ nor ‘Felicitania’ are among them. Bentham certainly did suggest that the proposed colony might be called ‘Liberia’, which was a ‘single word’ that ‘speaks volumes’, since in its realization the colony would incur no expense to ‘the Mother Country’ and ensure there was ‘no patronage for the profit of any of its rulers’. (Bentham ignored the fact, of course, that the nation of Liberia already existed). As we have established in our editing of ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ for The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and as can be seen below in the relevant manuscript, the suggested names of ‘Felicia’ and ‘Felicitania’ are written in the margin in pencil, and in a hand that is not Bentham’s.
Box 8, folio 171, UCL Bentham Papers. The pencil annotation can be seen to the right of the third paragraph.
If Bentham was not responsible for these suggestions, then who was? Unfortunately, we have been unable to identify to whom this handwriting belongs, though it does appear on several occasions in the margins of other ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ text sheets, indicating that this individual had at some unspecified point in time reviewed the text. For instance, the unidentified commentator made a note where Bentham apparently could not recall the English translation of a compte simulé (Box 8, folio 166), and about the ruinous failure of the attempted settlement at Algoa Bay in the Eastern Cape in 1820 (Box 8, folio 162)*.
‘Colonization Company Proposal’ will be published in Writings on Australia, a forthcoming volume of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, which is due to be published in 2020. In the meantime, you can download preliminary, pre-publication versions of the texts from UCL Discovery, while we keep trying to identify this handwriting.
(* I am extremely grateful to my colleague, Dr Chris Riley, for deciphering this marginal note)
Jeremy Bentham, revision, and self-censorship: the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’
By Tim Causer, on 10 October 2018
To say that Jeremy Bentham was a prolific writer would be a massive understatement: UCL Library Special Collections and the British Library hold between them some 100,000 manuscript pages which he either wrote or composed. According to Bentham’s literary executor John Bowring—who oversaw the production of the eleven-volume edition of Bentham’s works and correspondence published from 1838 to 1843—Bentham wrote, ‘on an average, from ten to fifteen folio pages a-day. He was seldom satisfied with the first expression of his thoughts, and generally developed his views over and over again’. Bentham would also have written many more than the 100,000 or so extant pages, as when he printed or published a text he typically destroyed the manuscripts on which it was based, making it impossible to trace the iterative development of a text in the manner described by Bowring. (For more on Bentham’s writing process, see P. Schofield, Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, 2009, pp. 30-5).
‘Jeremy Bentham writing, 1827’, engraving by George Washington Appleton after Robert Matthew Sully, ‘The Yankee: and Boston Literary Gazette’, vol. i (1829).
Editing Bentham’s ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802-3), which exists only in manuscript and has recently been made available for the first time for a volume of his Writings on Australia, provides a brief glimpse at certain stages of Bentham’s writing process. In two preceding ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ (Pelham then being the Home Secretary) Bentham had condemned both the practice of transporting convicts to New South Wales and the government’s preference for transportation over his panopticon penitentiary scheme, which he had spent much of the last decade trying to persuade the British government to adopt. In the ‘Third Letter’ Bentham turned his attention to the other two major forms of punishment which the government also appeared to prefer over the panopticon, namely what he referred to sarcastically as the ‘improved prisons’ of England and Wales, and the prison hulks, dismasted ships moored on the Thames, at Plymouth, and at Portsmouth.
Surviving among UCL’s Bentham Papers are two (perhaps two and-a-bit) versions of the ‘Third Letter: first is a manuscript draft, dating from November and December 1802, in Bentham’s hand and featuring heavy revisions on several pages; second is a revised fair copy, based on the draft and presumably dating from early 1803, in the hand of Bentham’s amanuensis John Herbert Koe, though with corrections and emendations in Bentham’s hand; finally, the ‘bit’ is a printed sample proof of the first six pages of the prospective text which Bentham had presumably sent to the printer in 1803, before he ultimately decided to abandon the ‘Third Letter’.
First page of the ms draft of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, in Bentham’s hand.
(UCL Bentham Papers, Box 116, fo. 534
First page of revised fair copy of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, in Koe’s hand with corrections by Bentham.
(UCL Bentham Papers, Box 117, fo. 254)
First page of the sample printed proof of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, with corrections by Bentham.
(UCL Bentham Papers, Box 117, f. 261)
In late 1802 and early 1803 Bentham had privately printed the first two ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ and a connected work, ‘A Plea for the Constitution‘, in the hope that the arguments they contained would cajole the government into proceeding with the panopticon. In addition he threatened on several occasions to publish the texts and go public with his allegations about the various illegalities of New South Wales and the corruption of the ministers who had sanctioned them, but each time he held back from following through on those threats. The suspicion is that Bentham realised that to publish these quite radical and subversive texts, so critical of the government and its ministers at a time of fear of political radicalism, could have been calamitous for his reputation and perhaps even for his liberty. (For instance, in February 1803 war with France loomed, and Colonel Edward Despard had been convicted of leading a conspiracy to overthrow the government and assassinate George III). Bentham expressed a particular fear that if his argument, made in ‘A Plea for the Constitution’, that New South Wales had been illegally founded and that the governors’ various local ordinances were all illegally issued, it could prompt a convict uprising and see the ‘setting of the whole Colony in a flame’. Bentham may have feared prosecution for not only seditious libel, but plain libel as well. In this sense, Bentham’s revision of certain parts of the ‘Third Letter’ might have seen Bentham engage not only in self-censorship, but also self-preservation.
The Juxta Commons interface, showing the side-by-side visualization of a source and witness text.
Thanks to the wonderful Juxta Commons, a tool produced by Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) which allows for the comparison and collation of versions of the same text, it is possible to more closely examine the differences between the draft and the revised fair copy of Bentham’s ‘Third Letter’ (which we have made accessible through the Juxta Commons interface—please see the links below). Juxta Commons’s side-by-side visualization feature displays the draft and the revised fair copy alongside one another, and highlights where the differences between them are found. The majority of these differences consist of relatively slight changes to words and phrasing, correction of spelling, punctuation, and other alterations for sake of clarity—or, in other words, the typical finessing of a text which any writer goes through when drafting and redrafting a work.
There are, however, a number of significant differences between the draft and the revised fair copy, with Bentham presumably having decided that it would be wiser not to include in the latter several rather incendiary passages which he drafted for the former, which touch upon what in Bentham’s view was the deliberate cruelty and corruption of the ministry. The revised fair copy was sharp enough in Bentham’s personal criticism of Pelham and his immediate predecessor as Home Secretary, the Duke of Portland, for having overseen the conditions leading to the appalling mortality aboard the Portsmouth hulks; in the draft Bentham’s criticisms on this point were if anything more vicious.
For instance, Bentham drew comparison between the mortality on the hulks of Langstone Harbour, where in 1801 120 of 500 convicts had died, with the infamous ‘Black Hole’ of Kolkata, a small prison in which, according to the East India Company employee John Zephaniah Holwell, 143 of the 164 British prisoners-of-war died when confined there on the night of 20 June 1765. Invoking the rhetorical power of the ‘Black Hole’, Bentham claimed that conditions on the hulks were in fact far worse and were the result of Home Office policy. As Bentham put it, the ‘Black Hole’ would ‘henceforward yield in proverbiality to Lord Pelham’s and Mr King’s and Mr Baldwin’s Hulk: the Hulk La Fortunée: for such, by a horrible catachresis, happens to to be the denomination of this ever memorable scene of official barbarity and negligence’. (Mr King was John King, Under Secretary at the Home Office 1791-1806, and Mr Baldwin was William Baldwin MP, counsel for criminal and colonial business at the Home Office 1796-1813.)
An extract from the draft (left) and the revised fair copy (right) of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’ in Juxta Commons, showing the passage comparing the hulks to the ‘Black Hole’ of Calcutta
The draft also contains Bentham’s blunt allegation of corruption and cronyism at the Home Office which was removed from the revised fair copy of the text. Bentham complained about the circumstances of the appointment, provided for by the Hulks Act of 1802, of Aaron Graham, a stipendiary magistrate at Bow Street, as Inspector of the Hulks on a salary of £350 per year. As a London police magistrate Graham’s salary had already been £400 per year, but had recently been increased to £500 per year by the Metropolitan Police Magistrates Act of 1802. Worse still for Bentham than this unwarranted augmentation of Graham’s salary was that Graham had not been appointed on merit but because he was a friend of John King, the Under Secretary at the Home Office, and because he would be willing to whitewash what had been happening on the hulks. Bentham suggested that conditions on the hulks had been allowed to become so bad until there came:
the occasion for recommending a friend [of King’s] to look at it. … A gentleman whose whole time had already been bought for the public and twice overpaid for it: paid by one Act, overpaid by another Act—an Act made on purpose. Two Acts made for one gentleman: both of them at the instance of Your Lordship’s Secretary—both of them under Your Lordship’s auspices. One to overpay a man for business he was already paid for … another to call him off from that to other business, pay and overpay still continued: one for making him receive more money: another for making him do less service.
Though this overt allegation of corruption was excised from the revised fair copy, it must be said that Bentham still hinted darkly at the circumstances around Graham’s appointment, but the point is made in a more subtle manner.
* * *
To compare for yourself transcripts of the draft and the revised fair copy of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, please visit the links below. As it can take some time for Juxta Commons to load the visualization for longer texts we have separated the text into the four sections in which Bentham presented it, namely:
- Section 1: a short introduction
- Section 2: ‘XV. Hulk System compared with Penitentiary and New South Wales systems’
- Section 3. ‘XVI. Penitentiary system in England—improved local prisons
- Section 4: ‘II. Hulk mortality—Sinecure made to screen it’
Please note that the third section of the text is the longest and it may take a little longer for the visualization to load than the others. The comparison has been set to ignore differences in punctuation and capitalization. Many, many thanks are due to NINES for producing Juxta Commons and for making it freely available.
Readers can also download for free a pre-publication version of the ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham‘, which is based on the revised fair copy of the text, though collating it where appropriate with the few printed pages and the draft. The other texts constituting Bentham’s Writings on Australia can also be downloaded for free from UCL Discovery.
Reflections on two years as a Transcription Assistant
By Tim Causer, on 9 October 2018
By Dr Katy Roscoe (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool/Institute of Historical Research Associate Fellow).
For the past two years I’ve been working as a Transcription Assistant, helping prepare Jeremy Bentham’s Writings on Australia for publication. Despite my title, I spent little time transcribing Bentham’s scrawled handwriting—in large part thanks to the efforts of dedicated Transcribe Bentham volunteers! Instead, I spent most of my time fact-checking the editorial annotation to the text written by the editors, Dr Tim Causer and Professor Philip Schofield.
Having written a PhD on 19th century Australian convicts, I was eager to learn more about the first decades of the penal colony. Bentham was the first ‘anti-transportation’ campaigner, and in three ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ (1802-3) he seethes at the government’s choice to transport convicts to New South Wales rather than support his Panopticon prison design. His revisionist ideas were remarkable and rehabilitation for convicts was as much as priority to him as was being economical. I took the inner workings of the transportation system for granted, so Bentham’s argument that denying convicts the opportunity to return home meant 7 or 14 year sentences of transportation were illegal, was a real eye-opener for me. On the other hand, thanks to an over-reliance on David Collins’ Account of the English Colony of New South Wales (1798 and 1802), I was disappointed by Bentham’s barely concealed disdain for the convicts themselves—particularly the women—who he depicts as lazy, promiscuous and arson-prone. These are stereotypes we know today to be untrue.
As well as deepening my knowledge of the Australian convict system, checking the annotation of Bentham’s Writings on Australia meant forays into unexpected avenues of research. I perused travel narratives for references to a dog who went abroad and lost its sense of smell, looked at floor plans of the Treasury Building, and scoured Don Quixote for one (of many) incidences of mistaken identity. It was certainly a lesson to me, as a junior academic, on reading widely to create a framework on which to hang arguments and ideas. It was also a lesson on the importance of proper referencing and checking your figures—a mistaken page number in Collins’ Account or inaccurate calculation of passengers on board convict vessels could take hours or days to untangle. Somewhere along the line my academic writing started to feature just as many dashes as Bentham favoured, and my supervisors were less forgiving than Bentham’s editors. I resisted for the most part, the temptation to add too many Benthamite phrases into my thesis. Though Bentham coined well-known words like ‘international’ and ‘maximise’, I avoided his lesser-known neologisms like ‘uncircumlocatory’ and ‘incongnosibility’.
Working at the Bentham Project sometimes feels like we were working for an (absent) celebrity. Not only was Bentham’s face on ID cards and screens on campus, he appeared on BBC’s Have I Got News, Private Eye, major news outlets and in museum exhibitions. He also had some pricey jewellery—mourning rings—one of which was recently auctioned at Christie’s. I discovered that everything I thought I knew about him was wrong, and ended up having to explain this to everyone I met at a party (No, he wasn’t the founder of UCL; no, his head wasn’t used as a football). It certainly felt like having a VIP backstage pass when the team got to see his auto-icon up close when it underwent conservation work by UCL’s Museums and Collections’ team prior to his visit to New York (though I’m not sure if seeing his underpants being washed was rock and roll or not!). But the real stars of my stay were the Bentham Project team themselves – so all my thanks to them for being wonderful as I bid them farewell after two years.
Bentham’s ‘Writings on Australia’ – pre-publication texts now online
By Tim Causer, on 5 September 2018
Editor’s note, February 2022: these preliminary texts have now been superseded by the final, authoritative edition of Panopticon versus New South Wales and Other Writings on Australia, a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham published by UCL Press. The volume can be downloaded as a free PDF, and is available in paperback (£25) and hardback (£45) formats.
The Bentham Project is delighted to announce that open-access pre-publication versions of the texts constituting Jeremy Bentham’s Writings on Australia, edited by Dr Tim Causer and Professor Philip Schofield, are now available to download from UCL Discovery. The preparation of these texts has been made possible by generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The texts in question, several of which are now made available for the first time, can be downloaded at the following links:
- ‘New Wales’ (written in 1791)
- ‘History of Jeremy Bentham’s dealings with Lord Pelham’ (1802)
- ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802)
- ‘Second Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802)
- ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802-3)
- ‘A Plea for the Constitution (1803)
- ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ (1831)
The first six texts are intimately connected to Bentham’s attempt to persuade the British government to build his panopticon penitentiary. The ‘New Wales‘ material, written in June 1791, a matter of months after Bentham first offered the panopticon to the Pitt administration, constitutes Bentham’s first detailed engagement with Britain’s infant penal colony of New South Wales.
In July 1793 William Pitt, the leader of the administration, and Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, visited Bentham’s home at Queen’s Square Place in order see models of the panopticon and the machinery which the inmates would operate. They gave their approval to the scheme and asked him to proceed with making preparations. Bentham subsequently spent the best part of a decade in negotiations with the government to have the panopticon built, but the attempt to bring it to fruition was, in Bentham’s view, beset by wilful delay and obstruction on the part of ministers and their underlings. These delays and obstructions had led Bentham to believe that the government had acted in the interests of the nobility rather than in the public interest and, by January 1802, to more or less accept that the panopticon would never be built. The ‘History of Jeremy Bentham’s dealings with Lord Pelham‘ (who was then the Home Secretary) consists of letters and documents compiled by Bentham dating from 12 April 1802 to 21 August 1802, which sets out many of his grievances in regard to the panopticon, and in effect constitutes a history of the beginning of Bentham’s assault on New South Wales, the government’s preference for which over his penitentiary frustrated him.
The ‘Letter to Lord Pelham‘ constitutes perhaps the earliest detailed critique of transportation to New South Wales by a major philosopher of punishment. In ‘Second Letter to Lord Pelham‘ Bentham continues his attack, seeking by sheer weight of example to demonstrate the failure of New South Wales as an instrument of penal policy, and to compare the colony unfavourably with penitentiaries in Philadelphia and New York—institutions characterized by surveillance and hard labour, and which thus constituted the closest existing approximation to the panopticon. ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham‘ sees Bentham extend his critique to the prison hulks and ‘improved prisons’, and is especially pointed in his criticism of Lord Pelham and his predecessor as Home Secretary the Duke of Portland for their having, for instance, not only ignored high mortality among the convicts aboard the Portsmouth hulks, but also in having actively contributed to the conditions leading to that mortality. In ‘A Plea for the Constitution‘ examined New South Wales on point of law, and sought to demonstrate that the colony had been illegally founded.
Bentham unsuccessfully sought to use his writings on Australia of 1802-3 to force the government to proceed with the establishment of the panopticon. Ultimately, the government decided to abandon the panopticon in June 1803 and Bentham set aside the works, only publishing the first two ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ and ‘A Plea for the Constitution’ in 1812, in a single volume entitled Panopticon versus New South Wales, when the government briefly again showed interest in the panopticon.
Bentham returned to writing about Australia in August 1831, though on the subject of free rather than unfree emgration. Between 4 and 14 August 1831 Bentham composed around fifty sheets relating to an incomplete work entitled ‘Colonization Company Proposal‘, which effectively constitutes Bentham’s commentary upon the National Colonization Society’s Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia.
‘New Wales’, ‘History of Jeremy Bentham’s dealings with Lord Pelham’, ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’, and ‘Colonization Company Proposal’, which exist only in manuscript, are here made available for the first time. The texts presented here are preliminary versions, in that the authoritative texts will appear as part of Bentham’s Writings on Australia for The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, with a full Editorial Introduction, name and subject indexes, finalized annotation, and working cross-references.
In addition to the AHRC we would like to thank the project’s co-investigator, Professor Margot Finn of UCL History; the British Academy and UCL for their continuing support of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham; UCL Library’s Special Collections for permission to publish material from its collection of the Bentham Papers; and our Bentham Project and UCL Laws colleagues. Particular thanks are due to Dr Katy Roscoe who has provided invaluable assistance in checking the text and researching the annotation. Finally, we would like to warmly acknowledge the contributions of volunteers to Transcribe Bentham whose draft transcripts of Bentham manuscripts were used in the preparation of these texts, and who are acknowledged in the introductions to the texts.
Tim Causer and Philip Schofield
Bentham goes back to school
By uczwlse, on 13 July 2015
It is a bit strange to go back to secondary school after more than 10 years away. I have recently been visiting Haberdashers’ Aske’s Knights Academy (HAKA) in Bromley to deliver a series of tutorials as part of The Brilliant Club. The Brilliant Club is a non-profit organisation focused on widening access to top universities for high-achieving pupils from state schools. PhD students and post-doctoral researchers work with The Brilliant Club to deliver University-style tutorials to sixth formers and younger pupils. These sessions are designed to build a foundation for University learning by developing students’ knowledge, research skills and confidence.
I have been teaching a group of four sixth formers from HAKA who are studying a range of AS Levels including Sociology, History and Biology. Our course is titled, ‘Because I’m Happy: Jeremy Bentham and his Ideas on Happiness’. The course is an introduction to Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism and concentrates on the application of his philosophy in matters of politics, religion and penal reform. As well as reading extracts from Bentham’s own writings, the students have been able to engage with Bentham scholarship – Michel Foucault’s perspective on the Panopticon generated a particularly interesting discussion!
I have been impressed by my students’ consideration of the meaning of happiness – how important is it, how can we measure it and can it be fairly distributed through society? We have also spent time exploring the contemporary relevance of Bentham’s ideas. The pupils all recognised that utilitarianism could play a significant role in current debates over the acceptability of government surveillance, the usefulness of religion and the inevitability of political spin. It has been great to see the students grow in confidence as they weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism in each tutorial.
Now that school is out for the summer, the pupils have the next few weeks to complete an essay evaluating Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism. Once their essays have been marked, they will have the opportunity to participate in a Brilliant Club graduation ceremony to congratulate them on their progress. I would like to thank the pupils for their enthusiasm and hard work. Studying Bentham can be challenging but their thoughtful contributions have made the experience an enlightening one for me, and hopefully for them too.
New online publication: ‘A Visit (in 1831) to Jeremy Bentham’, by George Wheatley
By Tim Causer, on 18 February 2015
The Bentham Project has published online for the first time the text of George Wheatley’s A Visit (in 1831) to Jeremy Bentham. Wheatley’s work, which describes in detail his visit to Queen’s Square Place, Bentham’s residence in Westminster, is also available as an open-access text in PDF or XML format from UCL Discovery.
Upon the death of his father Jeremiah in 1792, Bentham inherited the family home in Queen’s Square Place. Bentham referred to his abode as the Hermitage and himself as the Hermit. Despite this apparent reclusiveness, many notable statesmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals visited him, although some equally prominent figures (such as Madame de Staël) were refused an audience. Apart from half the year spent at another notable Bentham residence, Ford Abbey, between 1814 and 1818, Bentham spent the majority of his later years at Queen’s Square Place. He died within its walls, aged 84, on 6 June 1832.
Bentham’s house was demolished in the 1880s. The site is now occupied by 102 Petty France, otherwise known as the building which houses the Ministry of Justice. Between 1978 and 2004 this building (then known as 50 Queen Anne’s Gate) was the main location of the Home Office. On 12 October 2004, Councillor Catherine Longworth, Lord Mayor of Westminster, and Professor Malcolm Grant, President and Provost of UCL, unveiled a commemorative plaque to Jeremy Bentham on the gateway of the building.
We are sure that this text will prove extremely popular amongst Bentham enthusiasts, since Wheatley provides a rich first-hand account of both the house (such as the front garden or ‘paddock’, the steam central-heating, and Bentham’s ‘workshop’ with attendant ‘platform’ and ‘ditch’) and its permanent and temporary inhabitants (such as Bentham himself, his secretaries, and his visitors). Details are given about Bentham’s peculiar meal times (and his ‘preprandial circumgyration’, when he did his pre-dinner jogging) as well as descriptions of the dishes served. Illumination is also given to Bentham’s working practices, such as his unique ink-conserving writing style and his preference for ‘preaching’ (dictating to an amanuensis) whilst being shaved.
The text has been transcribed and lightly annotated from the original which was privately printed in about 1853. It contains a brief editorial introduction by Dr Kris Grint.
Response to The Guardian’s review of Bentham’s Of Sexual Irregularities by Professor Philip Schofield
By T Philip Schofield, on 7 July 2014
In his review of Jeremy Bentham’s Of Sexual Irregularities (Guardian, 28 June 2014), Faramerz Dabhoiwala suggests that the Bentham Project, which is producing the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, has been culpable in not editing and publishing these writings before now. The new Bentham edition is a massive scholarly task (30 volumes hitherto published out of a projected total of 80) which is almost entirely reliant on winning competitive grants from the UK’s research councils and educational charities. Of Sexual Irregularities, for instance, was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Given the enormous size and complexity of the task of producing a scholarly edition from handwritten manuscripts, and the need to rely on external funding, the surprise is that our small research team is as productive as it is. The wider issue is UK academia’s refusal face up to the question of how to fund long-term research projects in the humanities and social sciences. The research councils seem to be happy to disburse money to the latest flavour of the month, which promises some short-term impact, rather than scholarship that will continue to be of value for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Response to The Guardian’s review of Bentham’s Of Sexual Irregularities by Dr Michael Quinn
By uczwmqu, on 7 July 2014
In his otherwise positive review of Of Sexual Irregularities (Guardian, 28 June 2014), Faramerz Dabhoiwala refers to the way in which the ‘official Bentham Project largely ignored this aspect of his thinking’, and regrets the fact that ‘Only three of Bentham’s documents from the 1810s are printed … so that the development and full range of his thoughts on sex are impossible to trace.’ One might be forgiven for concluding that a veritable army of ‘official’ editors had grudgingly placed in the public domain a disjointed fraction of a much more extensive and coherent discussion of sex and the law.
In order to obviate this misapprehension, two points require to be made. First, the ‘official Bentham Project’ relies entirely on funding from research councils, educational charities, and the generosity of UCL, whilst the task of its very far from ‘huge’, but rather tiny (and diminishing) staff, namely producing a critical edition of some 80 volumes, largely from semi-legible manuscripts, might be likened to that of emptying a bath full of water with a tea spoon without spilling a drop. Second, Bentham’s temporally disjointed discussions of sex form no coherent whole, having been undertaken at widely different times, for different purposes. To have combined the discussions on sex from the 1780s, which formed part of a putative work on penal law, with the discussions of 1816–18, which formed an integral part of Bentham’s sustained assault on the baleful influence of religion on popular morality, would have been contrary to the basic principles of a critical edition, whilst to have undertaken the editorial work on the earlier discussions necessary to provide proper cross-referencing would very likely, and not unreasonably, have strained the patience of the Leverhulme Trust, whose generosity funded this volume. Dabhoiwala also omits to note that the preliminary text of the closely related work Not Paul, But Jesus, Part III. Doctrine, has been freely available from the Bentham Project website since May 2013.
Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality
By Kris Grint, on 3 February 2014
The Bentham Project is pleased to announce the publication of the 30th volume in the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham series. Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality was published by Oxford University Press on 30 January 2014.
The present volume contains three essays, ‘Of Sexual Irregularities’, ‘Sextus’, and ‘General Idea of Not Paul, but Jesus’, written in the mid-1810s but have never before been published in authoritative form. Bentham presents the utilitarian case for sexual liberty on the grounds that the gratification of the sexual appetite constituted the purest form of pleasure, in opposition to the traditional Christian view that the only morally acceptable form of sexual activity was between one man and one woman, within the confines of marriage, for the purpose of procreation. Bentham offers classical Greece and Rome, where certain male same-sex relationships were regarded as normal, as alternative models of sexual morality, condemns the hostile portrayal of homosexuals in eighteenth-century literature, and calls for the removal of sanctions, whether imposed by religion, law, or public opinion, from all forms of consensual sexual activity, at least in so far as practised in private. Bentham was, moreover, persuaded by Malthus’s argument that population growth tended to outstrip food supply. In these circumstances, non-procreative sexual activity had the additional benefit of not contributing to an increase in the size of the population. In the course of his discussion, Bentham expresses forthright views on various aspects of sexuality.
A discount of 30% on the list price is offered for online orders of this volume until 31 March 2014. Please download the promotional flyer for information on ordering.
A related text to the present volume, the preliminary version of volume 3 of Bentham’s Not Paul, but Jesus was published online by the Bentham Project in April 2013.