Life Sketch

• Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and political radical, best known as the founder of utilitarianism.
• He was born on 15 February 1748 in London into a prosperous middle-class family, the son and grandson of attorneys.
• A child prodigy, he began studying Latin at age three and read complex works like Rapin’s History of England.
• He preferred books over play and entered Queen’s College, Oxford at 15 years.
• In 1764, he graduated and went to Lincoln’s Inn to study law, qualifying for the Bar in 1769, but never practiced.
• Instead, he devoted his life to jurisprudence, philosophy, and reform projects.
• He remained a bachelor and spent much of his life in intense study and writing, often for 8–12 hours daily.
• His philosophy was influenced by Locke, Hume, Beccaria, Helvétius, Diderot, and Voltaire, reflecting Enlightenment empiricism.
• The most decisive influence came from Priestley’s Essay on Government, which used the phrase “Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number.”
• This phrase became the core principle of utilitarianism, which Bentham systematized.
• His philosophy was hedonistic, holding that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of value and motivation.
• According to Bentham, happiness = pleasure + absence of pain, and actions should be judged by their consequences.
• He introduced the idea of the felicific calculus, a way to quantify happiness and evaluate actions.
• He rejected natural law and natural rights as abstract fictions, arguing that law and rights exist only through government.
• This stance laid the foundation for legal positivism, where law is seen as a human creation, not a divine or natural order.
• His most important theoretical work was Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), where he developed the principle of utility.
• Bentham critiqued legal fictions such as “original contract,” “rights,” or “liberty,” seeing them as misleading abstractions.
• He emphasized conceptual clarity and empirical analysis in law, advocating reforms based on observable consequences.
• A practical reformer, he designed the Panopticon prison (1791)—a model where prisoners could be constantly observed—though it was never built.
• He attacked both Tory and Whig policies, but his disciples later shaped reforms like the Reform Bill of 1832 and the secret ballot.
• His works were widely published in French translation by his disciple Etienne Dumont, giving him more influence abroad than in Britain.
• He was made an honorary citizen of the French Republic (1792), and his Theory of Legislation first appeared in French in 1802.
• Bentham’s vocabulary left a mark on modern discourse, coining terms like “international,” “maximize,” “minimize,” and “codification.”
• His writings covered law, politics, economics, and religion, including Defence of Usury (1787), Panopticon (1791), and Book of Fallacies (1824).
• He inspired major thinkers such as James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin, who carried forward his ideas.
• His utilitarianism shaped Anglo-American legal philosophy and contributed to consequentialist ethics.
• Bentham’s impact was limited in his lifetime, but grew significantly later through his followers.
• In politics, he aligned with the rise of the middle class, industrial capitalism, and liberalism, advocating laissez-faire yet pushing for reforms.
• He died in London on 6 June 1832, leaving behind tens of thousands of manuscripts and a significant estate.
• Per his instructions, his body was embalmed and displayed at University College London, where the Bentham Project still works on publishing his writings.