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Unit 9: Jeremy Bentham

9.8 Summary Notes

• Bentham advanced numerous ideas which have become central to the liberal creed of the
nineteenth century. These were liberty of speech and of the press, liberty of association,
freedom of trade, freedom to emigrate from one country to another, support for the rule of
law, faith in public opinion, and freedom from arbitrary and despotic government. His
commitment to political and constitutional democracy, his support for the extension of
suffrage, his belief in the need to widen the ambit of participation to cover as many people
as possible and his faith in gradual reforms based on the individual’s expectations of security
injected new ideas into the traditional notion of liberalism.
• Bentham retained the Lockeian idea of liberty with due regard to property, but suggested
gradual redistribution of wealth through taxation of inheritance, to ensure a society where
the poor enjoyed minimal security and the rich did not feel threatened. In this sense, he laid
down the economic basis of the welfare state.
• Bentham’s concentration on security—on the instrument of good government—enabled him
to move beyond the Lockean conception of the minimal state towards one more appropriate
for a modem democratic society where security would be conceived more widely in terms of
education, health and welfare as well as real property and wealth (Rosen 1990: 68).
• Bentham was a firm believer in gradual reform. He had no faith in the violence of a revolution.
His detailed reform package played a crucial role in transforming early liberalism into
something that was “socially beneficent and never in intention merely exploitative” (Sabine
1973: 612). His contributions to the development of liberalism were varied and manifold. He
used ideas inherited from Locke, Hume, Montesquieu and Helvetius to mount a thorough
attack on outmoded ideas and practices. After Bentham, the most vocal strand in liberal
thought was based on Utilitarian principles. “Utilitarianism was essentially a British
phenomenon, a philosophy based on empirical investigation, hedonism, the association of
ideas and a liberal and humane approach to political and economic affairs”.
• Bentham’s Utilitarian principles not only dominated the liberal discourse, but also influenced
the early socialist writings of William Thompson (1785-1833). In fact, Beatrice Webb (1858-
1943) acknowledged Bentham as Sidney Webb’s (1859-1947) intellectual godfather, though
the Fabians did not accept the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Like Bentham, the Fabians realized the urgent need for institutional inspection and criticism
before social reconstruction. They were empiricists. Like Bentham, they regarded education
as the “keystone of reformation”. The Fabians, like the Utilitarians, organized a research
society patterned after the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which gradually
became the pivot of the Fabian society. They were associated with the University College,
and in 1895 established the London School of Economics. In 1912 they started the New
Statesman. Both the Utilitarians and the Fabians believed in infiltration of the parliament and
conversion of existing members. But the Fabians dismissed Bentham’s economic understanding
as weak. However, this was not surprising, for Bentham never thought highly of his powers
of economic analysis. Both rejected the theory of natural rights. While Bentham wanted to
emulate Newton, the Fabians, like Marx, were inspired by Charles Robert Darwin (1802-
1885), and both sought to build a counterpart of the natural sciences.
• Thanks to the efforts of many current scholars, it is at last becoming clear that Bentham may
with more truth be called the patriarch of British collectivism than the father of individualism.
The Fabians were direct descendants of Bentham via Chadwick and Forster. Indeed, as J.
Bartlet Brebner, one of the pioneer debunkers of the utilitarian myth, pointedly asks, what
were the Fabians but the latter day Benthamites? (Mack 1955: 88).

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