Bentham and Bureaucracy

Most accounts of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) deal with him as a prophet of either utilitarianism or of liberal democracy. This book discusses a less familiar but very important aspect of his political thought: his theory of how government institutions should be organised in order to function as efficient and yet responsive guardians of the community’s interests. It thus focuses on his programme for he executive and judicial branches of government rather than for the legislature and the electorate. Dr Hume suggests that eighteenth-century political thought was richer in ideas about government that has usually been allowed, but that Bentham’s special qualities of mind enabled him to widen and deepen those ideas much further than his contemporaries could have foreseen.

Preface; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction; 2. Government in eighteenth-century thought; 3. The foundations of Bentham’s thought: the Comment, the Fragment, the Introduction and Of Laws in General; 4. Further explorations in jurisprudence; 5. From principles to practice: the Panopticon and its companions; 6. From the Panopticon to the Constitutional Code; 7. The Constitutional Code and Bentham’s theory of government; 8. Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.