Jeremy Bentham: Early Life and Influences on Legal Reforms

Few thinkers have shaped modern law and government as deeply as Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. Yet his radical ideas did not appear out of nowhere. They grew from a privileged childhood, a frustrating encounter with the legal education of his day, and decades of restless writing. Understanding his early life and the influences that shaped him helps explain why he spent over sixty years trying to rebuild the law on a single, simple principle: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

A precocious child in a lawyer’s household 🔗

Jeremy Bentham was born in London on 15 February 1748 into a prosperous family. His father, Jeremiah Bentham, was a solicitor with wealthy and important clients in the City of London. This financial comfort gave young Jeremy advantages few of his contemporaries enjoyed, and it later allowed him to abandon a paid career and devote his life entirely to writing and reform.

Bentham was a remarkable child. Reports describe him studying Latin at the age of four and earning a reputation for writing Greek and Latin verse at Westminster School. His father, ambitious for his son, expected him to rise to the highest office in the legal profession. That ambition pushed Jeremy into formal education at an unusually young age.

Education at Queen’s College, Oxford 🔗

In 1760, at just twelve years old, Bentham went to Queen’s College, Oxford, and took his degree in 1763. He completed his Master’s degree in 1766. After Oxford, he entered Lincoln’s Inn to train as a barrister and took his seat as a student in the King’s Bench division, where he listened to the judgments of Chief Justice Lord Mansfield.

Despite this training, Bentham never embraced practising law. He was far more interested in performing chemical experiments and analysing the theoretical flaws of the legal system than in reading dry law books. When he was eventually called to the bar in 1769, he deeply disappointed his father, who had hoped to see him become Lord Chancellor. Instead of arguing cases for clients, Bentham decided to write about the law and how to improve it.

The encounter that changed everything: William Blackstone 🔗

The single most important influence on Bentham’s early intellectual life was a deeply negative one. While at Oxford, he attended the lectures of Sir William Blackstone, the first Vinerian Professor of English Law and the most celebrated legal authority of the era. These lectures were later published as the famous Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Bentham was not impressed. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he detected glaring fallacies in Blackstone’s natural law reasoning. Where Blackstone admired and defended the existing legal tradition, Bentham saw confusion, fiction, and an unwillingness to reform. He came to associate Blackstone with what he mockingly called the “everything-as-it-should-be” school of legal apologetics.

The critique that launched a career 🔗

This disagreement was not a passing irritation. It became the seed of Bentham’s first major work. In 1776 he anonymously published A Fragment on Government, which directly attacked the introduction to Blackstone’s Commentaries. The book was so brilliantly argued that it was attributed to several famous minds of the time. Ironically, public interest faded once Bentham’s proud father revealed the true author.

In this work, Bentham drew a sharp and lasting distinction. He argued that a legal commentator could play two roles: the expositor, who describes the law as it is, and the censor, who explains what the law ought to be. The Encyclopedia.com entry on Bentham notes that he condemned Blackstone for confusing these two tasks by both describing and justifying English law at the same time. For Bentham, the validity of a law should be judged by its usefulness, not by appeals to natural law.

The birth of utilitarian philosophy 🔗

Bentham’s critique of Blackstone naturally led him to develop a positive alternative. If natural rights and tradition were unreliable foundations for law, what should replace them? His answer was the principle of utility.

In 1789 he published his most systematic early work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Here Bentham laid out a comprehensive framework for evaluating laws and actions based on their consequences for human happiness. The right action, in his view, was the one that produced the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. He even tried to develop a “felicific calculus”, a method for measuring pleasures and pains to guide lawmakers.

This is the heart of utilitarianism, summed up in the famous formula that the proper goal of action is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Together, A Fragment on Government and the Introduction established the foundations on which Bentham would build his entire reforming project.

Looking beyond Britain: Russia and the Panopticon 🔗

Bentham’s ambitions were never limited to England. In the 1780s his attention turned eastward, partly because his younger brother Samuel was working in Russia. Samuel, a talented engineer, had taken service with Prince Potemkin, a powerful favourite of Empress Catherine the Great, managing industrial and military projects on a vast southern estate.

In August 1785 Bentham left London and travelled overland to join his brother, arriving in early 1786. According to the correspondence published by Project MUSE, he stayed for nearly two years, living quietly and spending most of his time writing. He had hoped to find a receptive audience for his legal theories at Catherine’s court, though he never actually met the Empress in person.

From an engineer’s idea to a famous design 🔗

It was during this Russian period that one of Bentham’s most enduring ideas took shape. His brother Samuel had developed a “central inspection principle” to supervise workers from a single point. As the UCL Faculty of Laws explains, Jeremy adapted this principle into a design he called the Panopticon, from the Greek words for “all” and “seeing”.

The Panopticon was imagined as a circular building with cells arranged around the outer wall and a central inspection tower. The key feature was that inmates could never be sure whether they were being watched, which Bentham believed would encourage constant good behaviour. He published the design in 1791 as Panopticon; or, The Inspection House, and saw it as suitable not only for prisons but also for factories, schools, and hospitals.

Bentham spent more than a decade trying to persuade the British government to build a Panopticon penitentiary. A site was even purchased at Millbank, but the project ultimately failed. He received £23,000 in compensation in 1813, but the experience left him deeply distrustful of politicians and entrenched officials. The episode is often cited as a key reason for his later turn toward radical political reform.

James Mill and the rise of the Philosophical Radicals 🔗

For much of his early career, Bentham worked largely alone. This changed dramatically when he met James Mill, the Scottish philosopher and historian, around 1808. Mill became his most influential disciple and a lifelong collaborator, helping to organise and promote Bentham’s ideas to a wider audience.

Mill was the centre of a circle of reformers and intellectuals who came to be known as the Philosophic Radicals, a label coined by his son, John Stuart Mill. This group believed that rational philosophy could be used to reform institutions and improve society. Their central political goal was to reduce the power and privilege of the aristocracy and to push for parliamentary reform.

Founding the Westminster Review 🔗

To spread their ideas, the group needed a platform. In December 1823 Bentham provided the funds to start the Westminster Review, with its first issue appearing in January 1824. As the history of the publication records, it was established as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, with James Mill as one of its driving forces in the early years.

The Westminster Review was deliberately created as a counterweight to the existing journals of the day. The Whigs had the Edinburgh Review and the Tories had the Quarterly Review, so the Radicals needed their own voice. The opening number famously included James Mill’s sharp dissection of the aristocratic nature of the British constitution. The journal helped turn Bentham’s abstract philosophy into a practical political movement.

Bentham’s later years and his lasting influence 🔗

In his final decades, Bentham was financially independent and lived quietly in Westminster, reportedly producing between ten and twenty sheets of manuscript every day, even into his eighties. He turned increasingly toward democratic ideas, advocating near-universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments, and worked on his ambitious Constitutional Code.

His influence also reached into education. In 1828 figures connected to his circle, including James Mill, helped found the University of London, now University College London, an institution designed to offer higher education without the religious restrictions of Oxford and Cambridge.

Jeremy Bentham died in London on 6 June 1832. The timing was symbolic. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, he died on the eve of the signing of the Great Reform Act, the landmark law that began the long process of widening the right to vote and reforming Parliament, exactly the kind of change his followers had campaigned for. In keeping with his belief in usefulness and transparency, he left instructions for his body to be preserved as an “auto-icon”, which remains on display at University College London.

What do you think? If Bentham judged every law purely by whether it increased overall happiness, would that approach protect individuals, or could it sometimes justify sacrificing a minority for the majority? And given his Panopticon design, do you think constant surveillance genuinely improves behaviour, or does it create a different kind of harm?

References

1. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bentham-jeremy-1748-1832
2. https://www.britannica.com/money/Jeremy-Bentham
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bentham/
4. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095459571
5. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/354/oa_monograph/chapter/2779955
6. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/research/research-projects/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/panopticon
7. https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/philosophic-radicals
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Westminster_Review