from Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction Applicable to any Sort of Establishment, in which Persons of any Description Are to Be Kept under Inspection; and in Particular to Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Houses of Industry, Work-Houses, Poor-Houses, Manufactories, Mad-Houses, Hospitals, and Schools; with a Plan of Management Adapted to the Principle; in a Series of Letters, Written in the Year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia, to a Friend in England (Dublin: Thomas Byrne, 1791), pp. iii, 4–10, 21–30, 35–43, 67–9.

ABSTRACT

Bentham was the son of a well-to-do London attorney whose ambition was for his son to become lord chancellor; his mother died when Jeremy was young and his father remarried. A precocious and brilliant student, Jeremy attended Oxford University and then studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1769. Meanwhile, he had attended William Blackstone's lectures on law at Oxford, and he read widely in Enlightenment philosophers, becoming a rationalist and materialist. From these thinkers he developed the utilitarian assumptions that human conduct was governed by desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain and that the aim of social, political and economic order was to ensure the greatest happiness to the greatest number. With Bentham's utilitarian assumptions, crime and punishment became a central topic in his work, for which he drew on such writers as Beccaria, Eden, and Montesquieu.