ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham has not yet received the criticism he deserves.1 Not that he lacks great critics: If Machiavelli is the most maligned political theorist in popular terms, Bentham surely holds the record for being hated by the cognoscenti. Goethe called him “that frightfully radical ass.” JohnMaynard Keynes considered his ideas “the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay.” Emerson called them a “stinking philosophy”; Joseph Schumpeter judged them to be “the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life.” Marx called Bentham “the arch-philistine . . . the insipid, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence.” Nietzsche despised Bentham, and made up a little verse:
Soul of wash rag; face of poker, Overwhelming mediocre, Sans genie et sans esprit. 2
Any thinker who evokes that caliber of enmity and that sort of attention, cannot be all bad: Whatever the flaws of his doctrine, it is emphatically not mediocre. Substituting invective for argument, these great minds easily make sport of the mad genius, yet utilitarianism survives unscathed. What is it about Bentham’s ideas that elicit such vehement rejection? What makes them nevertheless so tenacious? Mad genius Bentham was, working from six in the morning until ten at night
with time out only to jog around his garden, writing 15 folio pages every day, yet virtually incapable of finishing anything; keeping a keyboard instrument in every room of his house; arranging that after his death his body should be preserved as an “auto-icon” to inspire his followers. Brilliantly inventive, he envisioned not only the notorious “panopticon”—model prison, school, poorhouse, or whatever, built like a spider-web with the “keeper” at its center-but also such devices as a primitive telephone, a system for multiple music printing, reforms for the London police, a
central heating system, a law school run from his home; schemes for reducing the national debt, detecting forged bank notes, and securing low-interest loans for the poor; a national system of public education, a national health service, a national census; a “frigidarium” for storing food at low temperatures, and a canal to be dug through Central America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In love with words, Bentham bequeathed us an astonishing array of neologisms, including “maximize” and “minimize,” “codify,” “international,” “rationale,” “eulogistic,” “demoralize,” “deontology,” and “false consciousness.” Bentham was aware of his own genius and fierce ambition, and was deeply
ambivalent about both. Feeling unappreciated in his own land, he remarked that he would “like to live the remaining years of his life, a year at a time at the end of the next six or eight centuries, to see the effect which his writing would by that time have upon the world.”3 He also wrote of having “formed a plan of universal conquest,” by which he intended
to govern all the nations in the habitable globe after my death. With what weapons? With rhetoric? With fine speeches? With prohibitive and irritant clauses? No: but with reasons, with a chain of . . . articulate and connected reasons all depending upon one principle.
