ABSTRACT
Bentham (1748-1832) was the contemporary of Malthus, and shared with him the credit of defeating the famous Poor Law Bill of Pitt (1797-1798). In his Letters on Usury (1787) he extended Adam Smith’s “simple system of natural liberty” to bargains about loans of money. In his Manual of Political Economy (published piecemeal in 1798 and afterwards) he presented Adam Smith’s economical doctrines in more abstract language than their author’s and with an arrangement of his own. He divided actions bearing on political economy into three groups, “sponte acta,” or the acts of individuals and their results, “agenda” or “things to be done” by the State, which should be reduced to the lowest possible dimensions, and “non-agenda” “things not to be done” by the State, or cases of unwise interference. The last he denounces not as merely unwise but as unjust, for the individual is in economical matters all in all. Consideration of the community, however, cannot fail to come in, for Bentham diers from Adam Smith almost as much in his bent for legislation as in his indierence to history, and the legislator (in Bentham’s own language) must regard “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Even his economical denitions show the prominence in his mind of this point of view. National wealth, or the total of the means of enjoyment in a nation, is distinguished from national opulence, or the proportion of the said total to the numbers of the nation. The chief end of wealth is “well-being,” and a material object is wealth if it possesses “value, namely subservience to wellbeing.” We even hear (though at random in a conversation) that “the value of money is its quantity multiplied by the felicity it produces,”—a saying which illustrates the fondness with which Utilitarians dwell on what later writers have called the subjective element in value.
