Bentham, JEREMY, writer on jurisprudence and ethics, was the son of a pushing attorney in London, where he was born (in Red Lion Street, Houndsditch) on 15th February 1748. At the age of seven he was sent to Westminster School; and in 1760, being only twelve years old, he entered Queen's College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1763. But though his years were so tender, he appears to have been less unprepared than might be supposed to benefit by the university; for before entering it, he had already, by his precocious tendency to speculation, acquired the title of 'the philosopher.' His father, who expected him to become Lord Chancellor, set him to study law at Lincoln's Inn, where he was called to the bar in 1772. He never practised, however, having a strong distaste for his profession, which is paraded in many of his writings. Turning from the practice of law to its theory, he became the greatest critic of legislation and government in his day. His first publication, A Fragment on Government (1776), was an acutely hypercritical examination of a passage in Blackstone's Commentaries, prompted, as he has himself explained, by 'a passion for improvement in those shapes in which the lot of mankind is meliorated by it.' The Fragment abounds in fine, original, and just observation; it contains the germs of most of his after writings, and must be highly esteemed, if we look away from its disproportion to its subject and the writer's disregard of method. It procured him, in 1781, the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne (Lansdowne), at whose seat, Bowood, he afterwards passed perhaps the most agreeable hours of his life. Here it was that he met Miss Caroline Fox (Lord Holland's sister), who was still a young lady, when Bentham, in 1805, offered her his heart and hand, and was rejected 'with all respect.'
On the death of his father in 1792, he succeeded to property in London, and to farms in Essex, yielding from £500 to £600 a year. He lived frugally, but with elegance, in Queen Square, Westminster; and employing young men as secretaries, got through an immense amount of work and correspondence. By a life of temperance and great self-complacency, in the society of a few devoted friends ('who,' says Sir James Mackintosh, 'more resembled the hearers of an Athenian philosopher than the proselytes of a modern writer'), he attained the age of eighty-four, dying 6th June 1832. In accordance with his own directions, his body was dissected; and his skeleton, dressed in his accustomed garb, is preserved at University College, London.
A pamphlet on The Hard Labour Bill (1778), recommending an improvement in the mode of criminal punishment, was an excerpt from his Rationale of Punishments and Rewards (1825), which was written in 1775, but first saw the light in a French translation by Dinmont (1811). In these two works, Bentham did more than any other writer of his time to rationalise the theory of punishments by consideration of their various kinds and effects, their true objects, and the conditions of their efficiency. He published in 1787 Defence of Usury; in 1789, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; in 1802, Discourses on Civil and Penal Legislation; in 1813, A Treatise on Judicial Evidence; in 1817, Paper relative to Codification and Public Instruction; in 1824, The Book of Fallacies. His works were collected and edited in 1843 by Bowring and John Hill Burton, in 11 volumes. It is well, however, for Bentham's reputation, that it does not rest wholly on his published writings; and that he found in Dumont, the Mills, and Sir Samuel Romilly, generous disciples to diffuse his principles and promote his fame. In his early works, his style was clear, free, spirited, and often eloquent; but, from 1810, it became overloaded and darkened with technical terms. It is in regard to these more especially that M. Dumont has most materially served his master by arranging and translating them into French, through the medium of which language Bentham's doctrines were propagated throughout Europe, till they became more popular abroad than at home. James Mill, himself an independent thinker, did much in his writings to extend the application in new directions of Bentham's principles, a work in which, apart from his original efforts, he achieved a lasting monument of his own subtlety and vigour of mind.
In all Bentham's ethical and political writings, the doctrine of utility is the leading and pervading principle; and his favourite vehicle for its expression is the phrase, 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number,' which was first coined by Priestley, but owes its prominence in politics to Bentham. 'In this phrase,' he says, 'I saw delineated for the first time a plain as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous, in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or politics.' In the application of the principle Bentham arrived at various conclusions, which he advocated irrespective of the conditions of society in his day, and of the laws of social growth, which, indeed, neither he nor his contemporaries understood. He demanded nothing less than the immediate remodelling of the government, and the codification and reconstruction of the laws; and insisted, among other changes, on universal suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot, and paid representatives. Many of his schemes have been realised, many more are in the course of realisation; the end and object of them all was the general welfare, and his chief error lay in conceiving that organic changes are possible through any other process than that of growth and modification of popular needs, ideas, and institutions. It was this error that led the philosopher, in his closet in London, to devise codes of laws for Russia (through which country he made a tour in 1785) and America, the adoption of which would have been equivalent to revolutions in these countries, and then bitterly to bewail the folly of mankind when his schemes were rejected. But in Mill's words, 'he found the philosophy of law a chaos, and left it a science.' He may be regarded as the philosophic pioneer of Liberalism and Radicalism, and holds a high place in the history of political thought.
See J. H. Burton's Benthamiana (1843), Life in Bowring's edition of his works, and the articles JOHN STUART MILL, UTILITARIANISM, &c.