Introduction

Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748, the son of a wealthy member of the legal profession. Under the influence of the Enlightenment thinkers, Cesare Beccaria and Claude Helvetius, Bentham developed a precisely formulated version of utilitarianism as a distinctive perspective for evaluating law, politics and social institutions. In the early nineteenth century he worked on a number of projects of a philosophical kind such as a study of the nature of thought and language as well as issues of political economy and legal and constitutional theory. Bentham proposed that government interference by way of taxation could be reduced by allowing much of the fiscal burden of government to fall upon deceased estates rather than on the property or income of the living. The triumph of Benthamite jurisprudence was the elucidation by paraphrasis of the meaning of terms like right and duty in the context of positive law.