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The Upside Down: Jeremy Bentham – Auto-Icon for the People

In his monthly column, John Mitchinson remembers the original social justice warrior

The Corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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As the euphoria of election night subsides, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jeremy Bentham. 

He often gets left out of the roll calls of great philosophers, but Bentham could make a serious claim to be the most influential thinker since Aristotle. 

He was the father of utilitarianism, the philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’, and much of what we take for granted when we talk about ‘liberal democracy’ can trace its roots to him. But he was also a seriously odd man, as you will discover, which might account for some of his relative obscurity.

Bentham was never in any danger of being described as conventional. 

The son of a solicitor, he was a child prodigy who began learning Latin at the age of three and, by the age of five, could play Handel sonatas on his violin. At 17, he entered Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer, but the self-serving complexity of English law led him to disparage it as the “demon of chicane”. What really interested him was the flood of Enlightenment ideas crossing the English Channel arguing for the reform of a society based on injustice and privilege. By the time he was 20, he was writing about the evolution of society and the rights of man. 

Gradually recognised by a small circle of London intellectuals, Bentham’s first publication was A Fragment of Government (1776), a spirited attack on the English legal system. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), he was the first person ever to use the words ‘international’ and ‘monetary’, and he defined ‘utility’ as “the property in an object which tends to produce pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness”.

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In recognising the “utility of things”, Bentham’s conclusion was that the law should be used to ensure “the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people”. This was revolutionary stuff: the idea that ordinary people were entitled to happiness struck at the heart of the entrenched rights of the aristocracy, the crown, and the judicial system. 

In order to define ‘happiness’ precisely, the ever practical Bentham devised his own system for calculating it, which he called “felicific calculus”, listing 14 pleasures and 12 pains – though even his closest allies thought it a bit complicated to apply in real life. 

Meanwhile, the establishment saw Bentham as deeply dangerous. 

His “algebra of utility” seemed to eat like an acid through centuries of accumulated privilege and injustice. He opposed slavery, and both capital and corporal punishment; he believed in equal rights for women, and for animals; he called for the decriminalisation of homosexuality; he praised free trade and freedom of the press; he supported the right to divorce; and urged the separation of the church and state. 

His work provided the legal and philosophical principles upon which liberal democracy would be founded, although Bentham was always much more influential outside Britain. In 1804, Napoleon transformed the European legal system with his Napoleonic Code, based on Benthamite ideas. 

Nor did he confine his work to abstract theory. 

He made practical suggestions for electoral reform, all later adopted, including universal suffrage and the secret ballot. 

In Defence of Usury (1797), he persuaded his friend Adam Smith to accept the charging of interest on loans (G.K. Chesterton called this “the very beginning of the modern world”). 

He even designed a prison: the Panopticon (‘See-Everything’) with a revolutionary circular design allowing one person, the warden, to keep an eye on everything that happened. The Panopticon quickly became an icon of Big Brother-style surveillance and the curtailment of human rights. 

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But Bentham didn’t focus on things for long. Indeed, his astonishing work rate (he left five million manuscript pages behind him), his dislike of company, his habit of naming all his possessions (he had a walking stick called Dapple), his fondness for animals (“I love anything with four legs!”) all suggest that he might have been neurodiverse. 

The apotheosis of his eccentricity was to leave strict instructions that, after his death, his corpse should be preserved and displayed as what he described as an ‘Auto-Icon’ at University College London. Death, then as now, was a taboo, steeped in fear and religious superstition. Burying corpses and letting them rot in the ground seemed to him wasteful, repugnant, and unhygienic. So, why not turn them into 3D icons? Odd for sure. But also rather wonderful. 

And there he sits to this very day, a clothed skeleton with a wax head – the perfect Enlightenment object: a triumph for rationalism, materialism, and utilitarianism; and a rejection of fear, superstition, and the tyranny of the Church.

“Twenty years after I am dead, I shall be a despot, sitting in my chair with Dapple in my hand, and wearing one of the coats I wear now.” 


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