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Western Political Thought

Notes considered his ideas as the “shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life”. J.S. Mill described
him as a “boy” to the end, for he had “neither the internal experience nor the external, and had
lived a quiet eunuch’s life on a private income without ever growing up”. Marx regarded him as
“the arch-philistine, the insipid, leather tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence”.
Nietzsche (1955: 155-156) mocked at him with a little verse.
Soul of washrag; “face of poker”
Overwhelming mediocre,
Sans genie et sans esprit.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) referred to utilitarianism as “a philosophy of social cookbook recipes”.

9.1 Life Sketch

Bentham was born on February 15, 1748 in London in a prosperous middle-class family. He lost
his mother at the age of 10. His father Jeremiah Bentham, generally strict and demanding, ensured
a thorough education for his son, making the latter’s childhood monotonous and gloomy. As a
child, Bentham’s major source of enjoyment was reading books, with no inclination to play. This
explained his serious outlook. Bentham started to learn Latin at the age of three and went to
Queen’s College, Oxford, at the age of 12, learning to dislike, rebuke, suspect and hate anything
that was ancient or traditional, both in ideas and institutions.
Bentham studied law and was called to the Bar in 1769. He never pleaded a single case and gave
up the idea of practising law in the conviction that the whole system of law needed overhauling.
Like Hobbes, he was deeply interested in science, especially chemistry and botany. The French
philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771) and Cesare Bonesana, Marquis of Beccaria
(1738-1794), inspired and influenced him. It was generally believed that he came across the phrase
“the greatest happiness of the greatest number” with which his name was intrinsically associated
in the 1767 English translation of Beccaria’s Essays on Crimes, and Punishments (1764). Some other
biographers contended that he borrowed the idea from Joseph Priestly (1733-1804). In 1770, Bentham
acknowledged with a sensation of Archimedes the full import of Priestly’s phrase as being a
possible foundation of morals and legislation.
Bentham was profoundly impressed by Feneton’s Telemaque, given to him by his French tutor. In
Feneton’s version, Mentor and Telemachus, in search of Ulysses came to Crete at a time when
elections were to be held to fill a vacant throne. After an athletic competition, the victorious
candidates were asked three questions: What Man was most free? Who was most unhappy?
Which of the two ought to be preferred, a king who was invincible in war or a king who, without
any military experience, could administer civil government with great wisdom in times of peace?
Telemachus won the contest by arguing that the happiest ruler was one who made others happy.
Bentham was profoundly influenced by this tale. In this sense, his greatest happiness principle
was the rationale of his “childish, romantic idealization of Telemachus” (Mack ibid: 32).
From Helvetius, Bentham realized that legislation was the most significant of all worldly pursuits.
Legislation could bring about suitable reforms, since all human beings were fundamentally alike
and their differences were due to their upbringing, environment and education. He proclaimed
“... what Bacon was to the physical world, Helvetius was to the moral. The moral world has
therefore had its Bacon, but its Newton is yet to come” (Bentham cited in Halvey 1928: 19).
Bentham hoped to be that Newton. He also credited Helvetius with providing him an answer to
the meaning of “genius”, a word that bothered him ever since he was introduced as a “prodigy”
by his father to the headmaster of Westminster School, Dr Markham. Unable to answer the meaning
of “genius” when queried by the headmaster, Bentham was embarrassed. A genius meant to
produce. On learning its meaning, he began to wonder whether he had a genius for anything?
After enough soul-searching he realized that he had a gift for codifying laws.

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