ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns Jeremy Bentham's perception of the complexity of the subject made him not only less dogmatic in his conclusions than Austin, but perhaps also more obscure and less consistent. It draws on two passages to exhibit Bentham's views on sovereignty. The chapter draws attention to the fact that Austin either did not know, or for some inexplicable reason thought it unnecessary to mention, that Bentham's doctrine of sovereignty differed from his own in certain far more important respects. It distinguishes that legal illimitability and indivisibility, for it is Austin's insistence on these two attributes of sovereign power which makes it impossible for him to give an undistorted account of those legal systems. Bentham's views on the possibility of limitation and division of the supreme legislative power have to be collected from passages and often from footnotes in his A Fragment of Government, an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation and the Limits of Jurisprudence Defined.
