ABSTRACT:

“Bentham was the first among modern philosophers to place women upon a political equality with men. In Plato’s Republic this equality was to be fully recognized. But after Plato it was completely forgotten for over two thousand years.” (H. Thomas)

Jeremy Bentham was the intellectual leader and the real founder of English utilitarianism; whose deep interest in public affairs covered the period from the American Revolution to the Reform Bill of 1832. He was born in a rich lawyer’s family in 1748 in London. From the very childhood, Bentham was scholarly and pedantic. He learnt Latin when he was only three years old. He also learnt Greek and French and later on he devoted to the study of Jurisprudence and legal philosophy. He received the degree of graduation at the age of fifteen from Queen’s College Oxford. He had an instinctive interest in science and a distinctive talent for introspective psychology. From his youth he showed a passionate devotion to social welfare, identifying himself in imagination and determining to apply to the social sciences the methods that were being worked out in the natural science.

INTRODUCTION:

Bentham holds a distinctive place in the history of political thought. He was more a legal reformer and jurist rather than a political philosopher. He had nothing original in his political doctrine and also he did not create new ideas. Bentham was the first to establish the utilitarian school of thought. Maxey said, “Here was a doctrine to rock the foundations of all accredited political theory. With ruthless logic he brushed aside the ancient varieties of both radical and conservative thought; had erased all distinction in principle between free and despotic politics: had put it down that divine, feudal right, historical right, natural right and constitutional right equally and like were rubbish and nonsense. There was no right to rule and no right to be free, there was only the fact of power and the circumstances which made that power a fact.”

Influence of Utilitarianism:

Utilitarianism, a British gift to political philosophy, represented a British reaction against the value generalities about mutual rights and social contract and the mystic idealism of the German political thinkers. It brought political theory back from the abstractions of the Age of Reform to the level of concrete realities. The utilitarian philosophers particularly Bentham and Austin rendered valuable service to political thought. They were the thinkers who viewed society not from the ivory tower of isolation but from close participation. They were not idealistic, they were not utopian, they were not visionary and their philosophy was not transcendental. They built a new theory of government according to which government was based not on contract but on the habit of obedience of utility.

Achievements of Bentham:

Bentham was a true practical reformer and a great smasher of political evils in his age. He took keen interest in the political life of his country. Bentham and his followers are mainly responsible for the parliamentary reforms in England during the nineteenth century like the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. The following reforms are also due to Bentham’s suggestion:
1. Reform of law and legal procedure 2. University education became universal 3. Establishment of trade union.

Jeremy Bentham was a prolific writer and he collected works comprised of twenty-two volumes. His writings cover a wide range of interest including ethics, theology, psychology, logic, economics, penology etc. he wrote following most important books:

1. Fragments of Government.

2. A Defence of Usury.

3. Discourse on Civil and Penal Legislation.

4. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

5. A Treatise on Judicial Evidence.

6. A Theory of Punishments and Rewards.

7. Essay on Political Tactics.

CONCLUSION:

This essential relationship between philosophy and politics in Bentham's thought is clearly displayed in his distaste for natural law discourse. He attacked the American revolutionaries (and subsequently their French counterparts) not because they were inherently evil, but because they had been led astray by the metaphysics of inalienable natural rights ("fictions" of the political imagination providing a tendentious foundation for a new state). Once exposed as hollow and dangerous rhetoric, utilitarian doctrine demanded that natural rights theory be rejected. The relationship between philosophy and politics is also seen in Bentham's early jottings on religious issues dating from 1773-74 and, as one might expect, it is most evidently conspicuous in his positivist jurisprudence, to which he devoted most of his energy in the first decade of his intellectual activity. However, that a rift sometimes occurred between Bentham's theoretical constructs and his practical proposals suggests the difficulty of the enterprise, and defines a focal problem for students of his work. Ever since Elie Halevy described Bentham in his later years as a convert to "democratic authoritarianism" commentators have sought to stitch together apparently disparate elements of his thought.12 As more of Bentham's writings have become accessible over the past twenty years this task has become perceptibly more difficult, with scholars increasingly divided in their understanding of his thought and its application to practice. There are those who, in one way or another, emphasize Bentham's legal positivism and his tendency to advocate statist or managerial solutions to particular social, economic and political problems. They detect "authoritarian" tendencies in his thought, with his system variously described as "behaviouralist", "constructivist", "totalitarian”, “Interventionist” and collectivist.

REFERENCES:

www.credoreference.com.

www.google.com

Jeremy Bentham by Frederick Rosen.

www.utilitarian.net

www.cssforum.western political thought.

D. J. Manning. The Mind of Jeremy Bentham. Barnes and Noble. 1968. 118pp.

James E. Crimmins. Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham. New York, NY: 360pp.. 1990.

Charles Warren Everett. The Education of Jeremy Bentham. New York: Columbia University Press. 1931. 239 pp.

Subrata Mukherjee; Sushila Ramaswamy. Jeremy Bentham: Great Western Political Thinkers. New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications. 1998. 602pp.

Charles Milner Atkinson. Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work. London: Methuen. 1905. 247pp

Bhikhu Parekh (editor). Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments. Routledge. 1993. (4 vols.) 400pp.

Received on 29.01.2013 Modified on 20.03.2013

Int. J. Rev. & Res. Social Sci. 3(1): Jan. – Mar. 2015; Page 46-47