Response to The Guardian’s review of Bentham’s Of Sexual Irregularities by Professor Philip Schofield

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.