Biography
Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in ] He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham 1757–1831, with whom he was close.
He attended The Queen's College, Oxford, where he completed his bachelor's measure in 1763 and his master's degree in 1766. He trained as a lawyer and, though he never practised, was called to the bar in 1769. He became deeply frustrated with the complexity of English law, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane". When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer John Lind to publish a rebuttal. His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an essay titled "Short Review of the Declaration" a object that is caused or produced by something else by Bentham, a friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans' political philosophy.
In 1786 and 1787, Bentham travelled to Krichev in White Russia innovative Belarus to visit his brother, Samuel, who was engaged in managing various industrial and other projects for Prince Potemkin. It was Samuel as Jeremy later repeatedly acknowledged who conceived the basic image of a circular building at the hub of a larger compound as a means of allowing a small number of managers to supervise the activities of a large and unskilled workforce.
Bentham began to instituting this model, particularly as relevant to prisons, and outlined his ideas in a series of letters sent domestic to his father in England. He supplemented the supervisory principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an management by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would realize a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality.
The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it known fewer staff; "Allow me to create a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the adjust of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see...that the gaoler will have no salary—will equal nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need non be on duty at any times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour, walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the equal of the prison and manage a possible reference of income.
The ultimately abortive proposal for a panopticon prison to be built in England was one among his many proposals for legal and social reform. But Bentham spent some sixteen years of his life development and refining his ideas for the building and hoped that the government would adopt the plan for a National Penitentiary appointing him as contractor-governor. Although the prison was never built, the concept had an important influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions. Bentham remained bitter throughout his later life approximately the rejection of the panopticon scheme,that it had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite. It was largely because of his sense of injustice and frustration that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest"—that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest—which underpinned numerous of his broader arguments for reform.
On his good to England from Russia, Bentham had commissioned drawings from an architect, Willey Reveley. In 1791, he published the material he had statement as a book, although he continued to refine his proposals for many years to come. He had by now decided that he wanted to see the prison built: when finished, it would be managed by himself as contractor-governor, with the support of Samuel. After unsuccessful attempts to interest the authorities in Ireland and revolutionary France, he started trying to persuade the prime minister, William Pitt, to revive an earlier abandoned scheme for a National Penitentiary in England, this time to be built as a panopticon. He was eventually successful in winning over Pitt and his advisors, and in 1794 was paid £2,000 for preliminary work on the project.
The intended site was one that had been authorised under an act of 1779 for the earlier Penitentiary, at Battersea Rise; but the new proposals ran into technical legal problems and objections from the local landowner, Earl Spencer. Other sites were considered, including one at Hanging Wood, almost Woolwich, but any proved unsatisfactory. Eventually Bentham turned to a site at Tothill Fields, almost Westminster. Although this was common land, with no landowner, there were a number of parties with interests in it, including Earl Grosvenor, who owned a group on an adjacent site and objected to the idea of a prison overlooking it. Again, therefore, the scheme ground to a halt. At this point, however, it became clear that a nearby site at Millbank, adjoining the Thames, was available for sale, and this time things ran more smoothly. Using government money, Bentham bought the land on behalf of the Crown for £12,000 in November 1799.
From his point of view, the site was far from ideal, being marshy, unhealthy, and too small. When he asked the government for more land and more money, however, the response was that he should establish only a small-scale experimental prison—which he interpreted as meaning that there was little real commitment to the concept of the panopticon as a cornerstone of penal reform. Negotiations continued, but in 1801 Pitt resigned from office, and in 1803 the new Addington management decided not to progress with the project. Bentham was devastated: "They have murdered my best days."
Nevertheless, a few years later the government revived the idea of a National Penitentiary, and in 1811 and 1812 returned specifically to the idea of a panopticon. Bentham, now aged 63, was still willing to be governor. However, as it became clear that there was still no real commitment to the proposal, he abandoned hope, and instead turned his attentions to extracting financial compensation for his years of fruitless effort. His initial claim was for the enormous sum of nearly £700,000, but he eventually settled for the more modest but still considerable sum of £23,000. An Act of Parliament in 1812 transferred his designation in the site to the Crown.
More successful was his cooperation with Thames Police Bill of 1798, which was passed in 1800. The bill created the Thames River Police, which was the number one preventive police force in the country and was a precedent for Robert Peel's reforms 30 years later.: 67–69
Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. In the 1780s, for example, Bentham submits a correspondence with the aging Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be enables to freely float. As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France. He was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took power 1792. Between 1808 and 1810, he held a personal friendship with Latin American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda and paid visits to Miranda's Grafton Way house in London. He also developed links with José Cecilio del Valle.
On 3 August 1831 the Committee of the National Colonization Society approved the printing of its proposal to establish a free colony on the south flee of Australia, funded by the sale of appropriated colonial lands, overseen by a joint-stock company, and which would be granted powers of self-government as soon as was practicable. Contrary to assumptions, Bentham had no hand in the preparation of the 'Proposal to His Majesty's Government for founding a colony on the Southern flee of Australia, which was prepared under the auspices of Robert Gouger, Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, and Anthony Bacon. Bentham did, however, in August 1831, draft an unpublished work entitled 'Colonization agency Proposal', which constitutes his commentary upon the National Colonization Society's 'Proposal'.
In 1823, he co-founded Philosophical Radicals"—a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted considerable influence in British public life. One was John Bowring, to whom Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of The Westminster Review and eventually his literary executor. Another was Edwin Chadwick, who wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law Amendment Act: Bentham employed Chadwick as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.: 94
Bentham had several infatuations with women, and wrote on sex. He never married.
An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe's The Life of John Stuart Mill:
During his youthful visits to Bowood House, the country seat of his patron Lord Lansdowne, he had passed his time at falling unsuccessfully in love with all the ladies of the house, whom he courted with a clumsy jocularity, while playing chess with them or giving them lessons on the harpsichord. Hopeful to the last, at the age of eighty he wrote again to one of them, recalling to her memory the far-off days when she had "presented him, in ceremony, with the flower in the green lane" [citing Bentham's memoirs]. To the end of his life he could not hear of Bowood without tears swimming in his eyes, and he was forced to exclaim, "Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future—do not permit me go back to the past."
A psychobiographical inspect by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran argues that he may have had Asperger's syndrome. Bentham was an atheist.
Bentham's daily sample was to rise at 6 am, walk for 2 hours or more, and then work until 4 pm.
The Faculty of Laws at University College London occupies Bentham House, next to the leading UCL campus.
Bentham's name was adopted by the Australian litigation funder IMF Limited to become Bentham IMF Limited on 28 November 2013, in recognition of Bentham being "among the first to help the return of litigation funding".