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Bentham and Benthamism

2009, History of European Ideas

History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 391–394 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect History of European Ideas journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas Review essay Bentham and Benthamism Schofield Philip, Utility and Democracy. The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2006)., 370 pp. Blamires Cyprian, The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2008)., 442 pp. In an article published in 1999, John Pocock recalled a conversation with James Burns, the first General Editor of Bentham’s Collected Works. Pocock wrote, ‘‘[J. Burns] remarked that it was his duty to persuade me that Bentham was a human being, and I replied that I should be glad to be convinced that he was not a monster from inner space.’’1 Indeed, Bentham’s admiration for Helvétius alongside Hume, his rejection of the principles of the British constitution and his iconoclast religious thought stood out in Pocock’s narrative of the Enlightenment in national context. That Bentham continues to pose a challenge to the intellectual historian is due both to the fact that the textual cannon is still under construction and to the self-contained nature of his thought. These difficulties are compounded when it is remembered that Bentham’s life stretched over 80 momentous years of British, European and World history. Two recent works, Philip Schofield’s Utility and Democracy. The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham and Cyprian Blamires’s The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism address these issues – in very different ways – and indicate possible ways out of these difficulties. They also contribute significantly to Bentham scholarship. Since the 1960s, the editorial work conducted at the Bentham Project has led to the publication of nearly 30 volumes of work and correspondence drawing on the seemingly bottomless boxes of manuscripts held at University College London. The gradual uncovering of a substantially different figure from that of the Victorian edition of the Works (edited by John Bowring up to 1843), has posed problems of interpretation and forced scholars to establish a hierarchy between sources, be they manuscript, edited by friends such as Dumont, Grote and J.S. Mill, or published by the author himself. David Lieberman has summed up this quandary: ‘‘For the intellectual historian, [there is] an ever-widening gap between the ‘historical Bentham’ (meaning the figure known in the 19th century through the vehicles of Dumont’s Traités de législation civile et pénale and John Stuart Mill’s revisions) and the ‘authenticity Bentham’ (meaning the figure now recovered from the manuscripts and new edition).’’2 Professor Schofield, who is the current General Editor of the Collected Works and has worked on the Bentham Project at UCL since 1984 states the textual difficulties from the outset and establishes the following ‘‘hierarchy of preferred sources, choosing to rely, where possible, first on texts which have been published in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham; second, on texts which Bentham himself printed or published in his lifetime; and third on Bentham’s original manuscripts.’’ (PS, p. vii). Though this is a perfectly valid scientific choice, it does not, however, put an end to difficulties. Some volumes of the Collected Works were edited solely from manuscript sources which Bentham not always planned to publish,3 while others have had to rely at least in part on texts published by third parties, such as Etienne Dumont.4 Though there will always be room for debate in reconstructing the ‘‘authenticity Bentham’’, Schofield’s book invites readers to question the status of the texts throughout and to take Bentham’s intentions and publishing strategies into account. Cyprian Blamires has been one of the first scholars to study the life and thought of Etienne Dumont, Bentham’s first disciple and his earliest translator into French. He wishes to separate what he calls ‘‘the original Bentham’’ from 1 John G. A. Pocock ‘‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution; a Eurosceptical Enquiry’’, History of Political Thought, 20(1) (1999), 125–39, 129n. 2 David Lieberman, ‘‘Economy and Polity in Bentham’s Science of Legislation’’, in Economy, Polity and Society. British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, eds. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107–34, 108. 3 For a volume which was not clearly meant for publication in the form it was found in the manuscripts, see Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 For a volume which had to rely on Dumont’s versions as well as on original manuscripts, see Jeremy Bentham, Political Tactics, ed. Michael James, Cyprian Blamires and Catherine Pease-Watkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 0191-6599/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2009.04.005 392 Review essay / History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 391–394 ‘‘Benthamism’’, which he defines as the reconstruction of his thought effected by Etienne Dumont and which became popular in 19th-century Britain through retranslations into English (CB, p. 3). His study focuses on the Traités de législation civile et pénale published in 1802. He calls Dumont ‘‘a marketing expert [. . .], an erstwhile preacher and journalist attuned to the requirements of an audience’’ who ‘‘repackaged [Bentham and his ideas] in a series of elegant abstracts’’ (CB, p. 7). This statement is mostly supported by studies of the history of the composition of the works and of the paratext which Dumont added to his published translations – the prefaces and footnotes which he acknowledged as his. Blamires invites further work on the ways in which Bentham’s thought was received and spread – not only in Britain, but throughout the world, in the early 19th century. However, there is little textual analysis of the translations themselves, and sparse indications of Dumont’s working method. Such a detailed study would have allowed readers to go beyond the idea of Dumont as a skilful ‘‘marketing expert’’ and show in more detail how he inscribed his mark on the way utilitarian philosophy was formulated. The challenges facing scholars are not only due to the necessity to establish a hierarchy between sources, but also to the systematic and self-contained nature of Bentham’s thought. This characteristic feature makes purely historical and contextual explanations difficult to sustain – however indispensable they might be to make sense of a thought which unfolded from 1770 to 1832. Despite the fact that the two books differ strongly in their focus, what is most striking is their disagreement on what constitutes the ‘authenticity Bentham’, to take up Lieberman’s phrase. Schofield partly solves the first problem by choosing a broadly chronological outline while devoting about half of the chapters to transversal issues or notions. He begins by presenting the ‘‘ontological insights which [. . .] underpinned [Bentham’s] whole career as a thinker’’ (PS, p. 9):‘‘the theory of real and fictitious entities’’ (PS, pp. 1–27) and the principle of utility (PS, pp. 28–50). His account of these two cornerstones of Bentham’s philosophy substantiates recent scholarship while drawing on a wealth of unpublished manuscripts. Schofield draws simultaneously on earlier and later writings to show the unity of Bentham’s system but does not obscure the ways in which the system itself evolved over the years, especially in the case of the principle of utility. In a way which unwittingly parallels Halévy’s famous opposition between natural and artificial harmony of interests, Schofield shows that there is an enduring tension between two interpretations of the principle of utility: one which gives the primacy to the individual’s definition of his or her own interests and the arithmetic definition of utility, and one which confidently assumes that a utilitarian legislator can and must organise individual interests towards collective utility. In different political contexts over his lifetime, Bentham favoured one interpretation or the other, Schofield argues (PS, p. 50). The mutability of Bentham’s system is illustrated in the chapter devoted to the successive displays of Bentham’s hostility to natural-right theories (PS, pp. 51–77). Schofield’s account of the foundations of Bentham’s thought is rigorous and allows for the philosopher’s change of focus over the long years of his career, thus preparing the readers for his hesitations over democracy, for instance. Rejecting any teleological notion of ‘‘conversion’’ or ‘‘transition’’ to political radicalism, Schofield proposes the idea of ‘‘application’’ (PS, p. 140) to account for the various ways in which Bentham’s system responded to changing political circumstances.5 Blamires does not focus on the gradual unfolding of Bentham’s thought but on how Etienne Dumont had come to understand it by 1802, the year when the Traités were eventually published. For him, the key to Bentham’s thought is not to be found in philosophical principles but in a concrete architectural device, that of the Panopticon. He identifies ‘‘the original Bentham’’ with the inventor of the Panopticon, understood not primarily as a penal device but as a structure allowing the minimisation of public expenditure in a variety of circumstances (CB, p. 53). He thus makes the economic principles of maximisation/minimisation the focus of Bentham’s thought, while stating that this encapsulates his relevance for the twenty-first century. While there has been a tendency to question the centrality of economic calculations in recent Bentham scholarship, other writers such as Stephen Engelman and Christian Laval have recently stressed the relevance of Bentham’s thought to neo-liberal theory.6 Blamires notes the paramount significance of the Panopticon both as a central conceptual feature in Bentham’s thought (especially in his constitutional theory) – and as a key episode to understand his relationship to the political establishment. The latter point is also made by Schofield, who shows persuasively that the concept of ‘‘sinister interests’’ – which became central in Bentham’s political radicalism – emerged in the dual context of his campaign to have the Panopticon built and of his analysis of legal principles (PS, ch. 5). The image promoted by Dumont in his works drawn from Bentham’s manuscripts was certainly different. Dumont portrayed Bentham primarily as a ‘‘jurisconsulte anglais’’ whose principle of utility should provide a guide to legal reformers throughout Europe. But how far this betrayed the philosopher’s original intentions – as Blamires argues – is debatable. Reforming the legal system along utilitarian lines had been Bentham’s ambition from the early 1770s and remained his primary objective until his death. Bentham and Dumont met in 1788 through Lansdowne and, encouraged by him, both took a keen interest in the events unfolding in France. Dumont translated some of the essays Bentham addressed to the French from 1789, but did not begin the systematic task of compiling and translating his manuscripts until 1792. However different their background and objectives might have been, Dumont and Bentham were deeply influenced by their contribution to democratic debate and scarred by the events following the September massacres. The role of the French Revolution in the formation of utilitarianism is a central theme in Schofield’s and Blamires’s books. With Catherine Pease-Watkin, they each contributed, though at 5 For a fuller exploration of this topic, see also P. Schofield, ‘‘The French Revolution and Political Radicalism’’, History of European Ideas 30 (2004), 381–401. See Stephen G. Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Christian Laval, L’homme économique. Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 6 Review essay / History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 391–394 393 different stages, to Rights, Representation and Reform, the Collected Works edition of the volume containing Bentham’s writings for France during that period.7 Schofield devotes a chapter (PS, pp. 78–108) to the successive steps of Bentham’s interest in the French revolution, providing a companion essay to Rights, Representation and Reform. Schofield wishes to shift the focus away from the protracted debate on Bentham’s supposed ‘conversion’ or ‘transition’ to democracy, and therefore stresses the wealth of topics he wrote upon during that period: colonies, the economy, and above all legal reform. The chapter illustrates the extent to which Bentham’s opinions on the desirability of democratic reform in France and in England changed from 1788 to 1795. Schofield concludes: ‘‘he was tentatively exploring possibilities; he had not developed a systematic argument in favour of democratic reform, even though he was clearly aware that the principle of utility implied an equal right or claim to happiness.’’ (PS, p. 107). For the first time though, as Schofield makes clear, Bentham articulated a utilitarian argument in favour of democracy. He convincingly argues that this does not amount to a ‘conversion’, but acknowledges the formative part played by this episode in Bentham’s later constitutional thought (see PS, pp. 231–240 and later pp. 276–277, pp. 308–309). For those who are aware of the ongoing debate on the influence on the French Revolution on Bentham’s thought, the title of Blamires’s book is at first misleading: it does not deal with Bentham’s interest in French events, but on the formative influence the Revolution had on Etienne Dumont. Whereas Bentham surveyed what happened in France from afar, Dumont was directly involved in Mirabeau’s ‘workshop’8 until June 1790. After presenting the Genevan roots of Dumont’s thought, Blamires devotes two chapters to ‘‘Dumont in the French Revolution’’ (CB, pp. 132–180) and ‘‘Dumont’s Goodbye to Revolution’’ (CB, pp. 200–232). He recalls Dumont’s work with Mirabeau from 1788 onwards, to show how Genevan nationalism and an admiration for the British constitution combined in shaping Dumont’s revolutionary writings for Mirabeau. Drawing on a variety of sources in French and in English, Blamires thoroughly documents Dumont’s involvement in French events. He shows that Dumont’s politics must be taken seriously and deserves study in its own right. He concludes that the French Revolution converted Dumont to Benthamism for it allowed him to understand his friend’s ideas as a peaceful way out of the Ancien Régime and towards liberal political and legal reform.9 This line of interpretation runs throughout Blamires’s account of the genesis and contents of the Traités de législation civile et pénale. Non-French readers have so far had to rely on several selective 19th-century retranslations of the Traités into English.10 For the first time, this book provides a full account of the original, not only as a collection of disconnected essays, but as a consistent intellectual and political project. It also covers new ground in relating how the Traités were received in Genevan liberal circles, notably by Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, leaving the reader to wonder whether Dumont’s ‘‘marketing strategy’’ was successful, even among his countrymen. Though Blamires’s sweeping description of ‘‘the real Bentham’’ is provocative and not always rigorous, the book is much stronger on Dumont, providing a well-documented account of his life and thought. It is therefore a pity that both the title and the cover (picturing in the author’s words ‘‘Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory at Dresden, modern embodiment of the transparency Jeremy Bentham was seeking in his Panopticon’’) leave the Genevan out of the picture. In focusing on and thoroughly documenting Bentham’s political thought, Schofield brings much new and challenging material. As he demonstrates, epistemological, religious and legal thought are at the heart of his politics. Focusing on internal factors, Schofield tends to minimise contextual explanations for the making of the radical Bentham. The key moments he identifies in the formation of Bentham’s political thought are the discovery of ‘sinister interests’ in the 1800s (PS, pp. 109– 136) and his persuasion in favour of a republic around 1818 (PS, pp. 221–249), this original analysis deriving from a close reading of manuscript sources. First, Bentham had to be persuaded that existing rulers could not bring about the utilitarian reforms that would increase the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This persuasion developed in manuscripts on legal reform through the creation of the phrase ‘‘sinister interests’’ (the interest of the few when it opposes that of the greatest number). The extension of that concept to the field of politics led Bentham to abandon his earlier hopes that an Enlightened administration could implement top-down utilitarian reforms. Schofield shows that the phrase ‘‘sinister interests’’ was first used in 1797 in the context of frustrating dealings with the administration about the building of a Panopticon prison, then developed in writings on the law of procedure and evidence, and eventually transferred to the field of politics, where it was used to demonstrate that only a democratic system would ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number (an insight which had been briefly formulated at the time of the French Revolution). The discovery of the concept of ‘‘sinister interests’’ then, Schofield argues, paved the way for a systematic analysis of the corruption and influence at work in the British system. This allowed Bentham to embrace contemporary radical themes and propose in 1818 a Plan of Parliamentary Reform defended by Burdett in Parliament, while he entered into correspondence with Cartwright. By documenting Bentham’s dealings with 7 Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), see v–vii for editorial responsibilities. 8 J. Bénétruy, L’Atelier de Mirabeau. Quatre proscrits genevois dans la tourmente révolutionnaire (Genève: Société d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1962). 9 On this point, C. Blamires’s conclusions agree with Richard Whatmore’s in ‘‘Étienne Dumont, the British Constitution and the French Revolution’’, The Historical Journal 50 (2007), 23–47. 10 See some of the essays contained in he Complete Works, edited by Bowring such as Essay on the promulgation of laws, Principles of the Civil Code, Principles of Penal Law, A General View of a Complete Code of Laws; and Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation [1864], trans. Richard Hildreth, ed. James E. Crimmins (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2004). 394 Review essay / History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 391–394 contemporary radicals (as well as his relationship with Brougham or O’Connell in later chapters based on still-unpublished correspondence), Schofield invites more work on the contextual definition of what has been called ‘‘philosophic radicalism’’. Indeed, though it is clear that the foundations of Bentham’s radical ideas were different from those of Cartwright, Tooke or Burdett – with whom he corresponded – he came to meet at key-moments in his life the core of the radical programme, broadly defined: extended male suffrage, annual elections, secret ballot and reorganised constituencies. How Bentham’s own brand of radicalism contributed to radicalism as a political movement (if nothing like a united one) still remains largely to be studied. Schofield stresses the interconnectedness of Bentham’s political, legal and religious radicalism. His parallel between Bentham’s political and religious radicalism is convincing and shows how deep radical principles had become for Bentham by the late 1810s: the vocabulary of corruption and the analysis of its mechanisms are very close in all the writings of that period, be they legal, political or religious in focus. Schofield’s overall conclusions to the chapter on ‘‘The Church’’ (PS, pp. 171–198), that ‘‘there seems to be no direct evidence for [the view that Bentham was an atheist]’’ or that ‘‘Bentham did not object to religious institutions as such’’ (PS, pp. 174–175n; 198) are however puzzling in the light of the earlier sections of the same chapter, which are devoted to his dismissal of any argument in favour of either natural or revealed religion. Though Bentham consistently avoided disclosing his own beliefs, Schofield’s statement is not easy to reconcile with Bentham’s iconoclast and provocative analysis of the Gospels in Not Paul but Jesus, or with still unpublished manuscripts quoted in the chapter. Bentham’s ambiguous statements on religion are confirmed by an episode recalled by Blamires. Dumont, though no longer practising as a Calvinist minister, had retained much of his Protestant upbringing. Blamires shows that this had a direct impact on the way he dealt with religious issues in the Traités (see CB pp. 235–236). When he read the proofs in 1802, Bentham remarked: ‘‘You make me preach Equality among Priests. In short (God damn you to all eternity) you make me, who am a Church of England man, a Presbyterian because you are. There is pro and con, and I have never yet considered the matter expressly.’’11 Though Bentham’s most scathing manuscript texts against the influence of the Church were written at a later date, Schofield shows that the roots of his distrust of religious authority were laid as early as the 1770s (PS, pp. 174–175). Dumont did not ignore Bentham’s religious heterodoxy, but his choice to present true religion as congruent with utility in the Traités, and Bentham’s implicit endorsement of these views remain puzzling. Much remains therefore to be done on Bentham’s religious thought. Though highly different in scope and in focus – not to mention the style, these two books display a broad variety of methodological tools and significantly contribute to shed light on the historical development of classical utilitarianism. Schofield’s Utility and Democracy will remain a classic exploration of Bentham’s political thought and opens many challenging arenas for further research. Blamires’s historical study is an important contribution to Dumont’s role in the definition of utilitarianism. Dumont was, however, only one of the friends and disciples of Bentham turned editors: there is a collective element in the formation of classical utilitarianism. To his 19th-century friends and editors, at least, Bentham was not ‘a monster from inner space’ but provided conceptual tools which were directly relevant to contemporary political debates. Emmanuelle de Champs University of Paris, 8, France E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 2 June 2009 11 Jeremy Bentham, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 7, 1801-1808, e d. J. R. Dinwiddy (Oxford, 1988), 30.