ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some of the places where it would be fruitful to link the newly 'rescued' Jeremy Bentham and the extensively revised intellectual history of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. It pursues some quite basic questions concerning the kinds of ideas about social conduct Bentham presumed in his legislative theory and programme; the question of the sociology informing Bentham's jurisprudence. The chapter involves taking up some well-established themes: the nature and extent of Bentham's debts to political economy, particularly as elaborated by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations; and the alleged 'economic' presuppositions of Bentham's treatment of human nature. It introduces a more neglected dimension of Bentham's radical political programme: the role of public opinion and print culture in the operation of the democratic society elaborated in the Constitutional Code. The science of political economy the 'general theory' considering 'everything which concerns the wealth of nations' was 'a branch of the science of legislation' Bentham was eager to embrace.
