ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham is a famous British legal philosopher and social reformer perhaps best known as a proponent of the utilitarian doctrine of "the greatest good for the greatest number". His work on the peace issue, however, is little known, at least in the United States. When he set out to write Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace, Bentham could easily have simply chosen to adopt one of the models of world federalism that had been proposed in the late seventeenth century. Instead, he came up with a new idea. Although one American treatise writer insists upon finding Bentham's proposal to be "strikingly similar" to federalist proposals by Abbe de Saint Pierre and Rousseau, there is a critical difference: Bentham's "Diet" is not a world parliament that would make world law as part of a world government. There is an ongoing debate about what impact Bentham's plan had on the subsequent British peace movement.
