died when he was eleven and his father sent him to study classics at Oxford soon afterward. The young Bentham was far from impressed: “I learned nothing,” he concluded. “We just went to the foolish lectures of tutors to learn something of logical jargon.” At seventeen he entered Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer, but the self-serving complexity of English law led him to disparage it as “the Demon of Chikane.” What really interested him was the flood of Enlightenment ideas crossing the English Channel arguing for the reform of a society based on injustice and privilege. By the time he was twenty he had begun writing about the evolution of society and the rights of man. He described himself as “eeking and picking his way, getting the better of prejudice and non-sense, making a little bit of discovery here and there.”
Bentham was gradually recognized by a small circle of London intellectuals; his first publication was
In recognizing the “utility of things,” Bentham’s conclusion was that the law should be used to ensure “the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.” This was revolutionary stuff: The idea that ordinary people were entitled to happiness struck at the heart of the entrenched rights of the aristocracy, the Crown, and the judicial system. In order to define happiness precisely, the ever-practical Bentham devised his own system for calculating it, which he called felicific calculus, listing fourteen pleasures and twelve pains—though even his closest allies thought it a bit complicated to apply in real life.
The establishment saw Bentham as deeply dangerous. His “algebra of utility” seemed to eat like an acid through centuries of accumulated privilege and injustice. He opposed slavery and both capital and corporal punishment; he believed in equal rights for women and for animals; he called for the decriminalizing of homosexuality; he praised free trade and the freedom of the press; he supported the right to divorce and urged the separation of church and state. Most of what we now call liberalism can be traced back to Bentham. Many other people—not least William Blake—espoused the very same causes, but utilitarianism provided the legal and philosophical principles upon which liberal democracy would be founded. In his lifetime Bentham was much more influential outside Britain: In 1804 Napoleon transformed the European legal system with his Code Napoleon, based on Bentham’s ideas.
In Bentham’s view, English case law, which was administered by judges, had a poor record in delivering justice. He pointed to the absurdity and viciousness of more than two hundred separate offenses being punishable by death, including “breaking and entering by a child under ten” and homosexuality.
As well as intellectual acumen, Bentham’s other weapon was his work rate. He cultivated friendships—by letter, as he disliked meetings—with the great and the good: from Catherine the Great of Russia to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the newly independent United States; from Francisco da Miranda, the Latin American revolutionary, to Talleyrand, the French master statesman. His ideas were so admired in France that in 1792 he was made an honorary citizen.
Nor did he confine his work to abstract theory. He designed a prison: the Panopticon (“see-everything”), whose revolutionary circular design gave prisoners a reasonable amount of space in their cells, but allowed both jailers and inmates to be seen from a central viewing area. This allowed one person, the prison warden, to keep an eye on everything that happened. The fact that everyone was under constant surveillance would, Bentham thought, allow the prison to function efficiently and peacefully and make its design applicable to lunatic asylums, schools, and hospitals. The Panopticon influenced the layout of penal institutions all over the world, including those at Pentonville in London and Joliet Prison in Illinois. Bentham also made practical suggestions for electoral reform, all later adopted, including universal suffrage and the secret ballot. In
Despite his relatively low profile in the Anglo-Saxon world at the time, Bentham could make a serious claim to being the most influential philosopher since Aristotle. And he may yet have more surprises in store for us. As he produced, without fail, fifteen to twenty pages of notes every day, he left an archive of more than 5 million manuscript pages behind him, fewer than half of which have ever been published. The Bentham Project at University College London, begun in 1968, is now up to twenty-five volumes.
The regularity and sheer pace of his work life protected Bentham from social engagements, which he avoided as much as he could. He didn’t need company, describing himself as being “in a state of perpetual and unruffled gaiety.” This, and his personal fortune, meant he could pick and choose the people he associated with. He refused to see the French intellectual and writer Madame de Stael (1766–1817) when she asked to meet him, saying she was nothing more than a “trumpery magpie.” He once met Dr. Johnson but declared him to be “a pompous vamper of commonplace morality.” Apart from two early dalliances, he seemed to have no intimate dealings with women, although even at the end of his life, memories of his romantic youth would quickly move him to tears. “Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future,” he would beg his guests. “Do not let me go back to the past.” He did occasionally allow friends to dine with him, making lists of conversational topics beforehand. At ten o’clock, he took tea. At eleven, a nightcap of half a glass of Madeira, the only alcohol he ever drank. By twelve, his guests would find themselves unceremoniously ejected. He slept on a hard bed and suffered from bad dreams and loud snoring (“If a Bentham does not snore,” he said, “he’s not legitimate”). By day his favorite pastime was badminton—then known as battledore, where the players simply kept the shuttlecock in the air for the highest number of hits possible. In Bentham’s lifetime, a Somerset family set the record, managing 2,117. He was also one of the first joggers, startling people by suddenly taking off at high speed while walking in London parks or in his garden on what he called ante-prandial circumgyrations. He once confessed he couldn’t swim or whistle, but “saw no reason to complain.”
As he got older, his eccentricities multiplied. He kept two walking sticks, Dapple and Dobbin. On meeting friends he would use one or other of these to tap them on the shoulders, in mock knighthoods. He also had a “sacred teapot” called Dickey, which he referred to as a pet. His (real) pet pig allegedly shared his bed for a time, and he was also fond of cats, in particular a tomcat called Langhorne that he referred to as “Sir John” for several years, before redesignating him a vicar to be addressed as “The Reverend John Langhorne.” His collection of mice ran wild in his office, destroying manuscripts and terrifying guests. “I love anything with four legs!” he proclaimed. Bentham’s house had once belonged to John Milton, to whom he erected a plaque in the garden calling him the Prince of Poets, though he personally found poetry a “misapplication of time.” “Prose,” he said, “is when all the lines except the last go on to the margin. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.” It’s hard to know whether he was employing the same dry wit when he wrote to the London City Council asking if he could replace the shrubs beside his driveway with mummified corpses, which he said would be “more aesthetic than flowers.” This idea was developed further in his book
Bentham liked a joke, but his writing on the Auto-Icon can’t simply be dismissed as either a prank or the onset of dementia. His value as a philosopher was in his unswerving application of the principle of utility. Death, then as now, was a taboo, steeped in fear and religious superstition. Burying corpses and letting them rot in the ground seemed to him wasteful, repugnant, and unhygienic. Graveyards had been fearful places to him since childhood. He recalled going through one at night, his heart “going pit-a-pat all the while, and I fancied I saw a ghost perched on every tombstone.” The Auto-Icon solved both problems at once. It made death useful, offering the safe disposal of corpses, while providing a permanent memorial to the dead person. Bentham’s own Auto-Icon at University College is the perfect Enlightenment object, a triumph for rationalism, materialism, and utilitarianism, and a rejection of fear, superstition, and the tyranny of the Church. The fact that it is also very odd and faintly off- putting somehow seems entirely in character with its inventor:
Twenty years after I am dead, I shall be a despot, sitting in my chair with Dapple in my hand, and wearing
