Reference
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), by T. Patrick Burke,
The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 15 Aug 2008
Biographical essay
"Jeremy Bentham is known today chiefly as the father of utilitarianism. ... In Bentham's time, law, judicial procedures, and life in general were governed, to a much greater degree than in our own, by historical precedent and beliefs not subjected to critical examination. We owe much of the difference between his time and ours to Bentham. ... Bentham argued that a policy or procedure was in accordance with reason when it maximized utility, understood as human happiness. One must judge a program in the light not of unproven assumptions, no matter how venerable, but of its consequences for people."
Biography
Who Was Jeremy Bentham?
University College London, Bentham Project
Web Sites
UCL Bentham Project
University College London
Articles
Bentham, by
John Stuart Mill,
London and Westminster Review, Aug 1838
Opens by contrasting Bentham as a Progressive and Coleridge as a Conservative, then proceeds to examine and criticise Bentham philosophical method, and then his theories of life, law, government and utility
"He was a man both of remarkable endowments for philosophy, and of remarkable deficiencies for it; fitted, beyond almost any man, for drawing from his premises, conclusions not only correct, but sufficiently precise and specific to be practical; but whose general conception of human nature and life furnished him with an unusually slender stock of premises."
Reasoning on the Nature of Things, by Clarence B. Carson,
The Freeman, Feb 1982
"Jeremy Bentham said of those who believed in natural law that they 'take for their subject the pretended law of nature; an obscure phantom, which in the imaginations of those who go in chase of it, points sometimes to manners, sometimes to laws; sometimes to what law is, and sometimes to what it ought to be.'"
Security Cameras' Slippery Slope, by Gene Healy,
The Washington Examiner, 11 May 2010
Discusses the use of surveillance cameras in New York City, in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as well as drones by British police
"In 1787, utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind,' the 'Panopticon' — a building designed so that all the occupants could be monitored from a central point, 'always feel[ing] themselves as if under inspection.' This would work well in prisons, Bentham thought, but also in schools and factories. There's more than a little of Bentham's vision in Britain's burgeoning surveillance state. The Panopticon's no panacea, though. ... An internal study by London police showed that for every 1,000 cameras, fewer than 'one crime is solved per year' using video evidence."
The Courts and the New Deal, Part 1, by William L. Anderson,
Future of Freedom, Jun 2005
"Perhaps it is deeply ironic that in 1776, the same year the Declaration of Independence was written, the 'champion' of modern law made his own intellectual debut in England. Jeremy Bentham, who sat in Blackstone's Oxford lectures as a student, penned an anonymous attack on Blackstone entitled 'A Fragment on Government.'"
