Introduction

Bentham, like any other political philosopher, can be looked at in a number of different ways. He can be seen with Mill as a one-eyed man who offered philosophy a new method of analysis. ¹ Or he can be seen with Marx as an ‘insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century’ who could not ‘have been made anywhere else than in England’. ² a He can also be seen, following Halévy, as a ‘philosophic radical’, ‘almost a God with James Mill as his Saint Paul’, ³ who married economic liberalism to moral and legal authoritarianism and barely managed to remain a political liberal. One might go even further and follow C. K. Ogden in regarding Bentham ‘as one of the greatest figures in European thought, along with Reamur, Leibnitz, Newton, Malthus and Helmholtz’. ⁴ A sceptic might find that Michael Oakeshott's view of him as a credulous rationalist, as a philosophe who ‘spent his life talking about first principles but who never once got beyond a consideration of what is secondary and dependent’ ⁵ is perhaps more satisfactory. While the debate between these and other fascinating interpretations of Bentham goes on, I suggest that one other way of looking at him is to see him as articulating, or rather reflecting, some of the important assumptions, values and prejudices that have gone into the composition of the modern Western civilization. What follows is an attempt to explore this line of inquiry.