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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Bentham, a founder of political science based on the calculation of interest, has been misread as a crass materialist. I argue, instead, that Bentham's interest is a specific product of the imagination, and the pleasures and pains of which it is composed are also products of the imagination. On my reading, interests and imaginations are always governed and the role of Bentham's political science is to help govern them more effectively and efficiently. Political science is a mode of what he calls ‘indirect legislation’. Various interest-based modes of analysis have been attacked by constructivist critics, but I argue that the arch-theorist of interest himself relies on constructivist modes of analysis. What lessons can we learn from this? We should pay less attention to methodological and foundational conflicts, and pay more attention to the practices of government that social science may or may not indirectly legislate.
1 I have translated the following from an essay Bentham wrote in the late 1780s: ‘Or une imperfection toujours imaginaire est par cela même une imperfection sentie; car entre s'imaginer toujours malheureux et etre toujours malheureux quelle est la difference?’ (Halévy, Elie, La Formation du Radicalisms Philosophique I: La Jeunesse de Bentham, Paris, 1901, p. 433)Google Scholar. Many thanks to Philip Schofield for calling my attention to this passage.
2 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Robbins, Bruce, Minneapolis, , 1993, p. 274Google Scholar.
3 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., London, 1970 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 12nGoogle Scholar. What is true of ‘interest’ is true of many names of fictitious entities, which can be analysed into names of real entities through a technique of paraphrasis. See the analysis cited in section III below, and for a comprehensive account of Bentham's theory of fictions see Ogden, C. K., Bentham's Theory of Fictions, London, 1932Google Scholar. Italics in this and all subsequent Bentham quotations are from the cited texts, and from underlinings in the case of the manuscripts.
4 See David Hume, ‘Of the Original Contract’, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene P. Miller, Indianapolis, rev. edn 1987; Dinwiddy, J. R., Bentham, Oxford, 1989, p. 74Google Scholar; Long, Douglas G., ‘Taking Interests Seriously’, Rationality and Society, III (1991)Google Scholar.
5 See Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The German Ideology, ed. Arthur, C. J., New York, 1970Google Scholar; Fish, Stanley, ‘Force’, Doing What Comes Naturally, Durham, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 This use of ‘Bentham’ is of course metonymical.
7 Werner Stark tells us: ‘The key to Bentham's philosophy of economics is, of course, the fact that he was a confirmed materialist’ (Bentham, , Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, ed. Stark, W., 3 vols., London, 1952–1954, i. 16)Google Scholar. See also Long, Douglas G., Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's Idea of Liberty in Relation to his Utilitarianism, Toronto, 1977, pp. 5Google Scholar f. For a typical objection to the supposed reductionism of Benthamite psychology and morality, see Brown, Kevin L., ‘Comments on Long's “Taking Interests Seriously”’, Rationality and Society, III (1991)Google Scholar. For a typical rational choice reading of Bentham as materialist forerunner of a now positivist programme, in a defence of what they wrongly take to be his ‘experienced utility’ against the contemporary ‘decision utility’ paradigm, see Kahneman, David, Wakker, Peter P., and Sarin, Rakesh, ‘Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXII (1977)Google Scholar. Douglas Long is, as far as I know, the only scholar to have explored the specific importance of the imagination in Bentham, in ‘The Secularized Imagination in Early Modern Political Thought: Hume, Smith and Bentham’ (unpub. paper), Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 1997.
8 This is perhaps overstating the case, but some such mapping and contrast can be seen in the works surveyed by Crimmins, James E. in ‘Contending Interpretations of Bentham's Utilitarianism’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, XXIX (1996)Google Scholar. The contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ harmonies dates at least from Halévy (The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, trans. Morris, Mary, Clifton, , NJ, 1972, pp. 15–18)Google Scholar; the libertarian critique is epitomized by F. A. Hayek's characterization of Bentham as a ‘constructivist rationalist’ opposed to the ‘spontaneous order’ of true liberalism (see e.g. Hayek, , Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago, 1967, pp. 160–2)Google Scholar. Defences of Bentham's liberalism include Allison Dube's successful assimilation of Hayek to Bentham in Dube, , The Theme of Acquisitiveness in Bentham's Political Thought, New York, 1991, pp. 198–313Google Scholar, Kelly, P. J., Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar, and Quinn, Michael, ‘The Fallacy of Non-interference: The Poor Panopticon and Equality of Opportunity’, Bentham Newsletter, I (1997)Google Scholar. My essay will inevitably be read by many as a strongly dirigiste interpretation of Bentham (see Dinwiddy, J. R., Bentham, Oxford, 1989, p. 90)Google Scholar, but this is a misreading based on an investment in the terms of this debate.
9 Bentham, Jeremy, Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838–1843, ii. 501Google Scholar. In the forthcoming Collected Works edition ‘Nonsense Upon Stilts’ has been restored as Bentham's title of the essay formerly known as ‘Anarchical Fallacies’.
10 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, ‘Slippery Bentham: Some Neglected Cracks in the Foundation of Utilitarianism’, Political Theory, XVIII (1990)Google Scholar.
11 Kelly, , Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice, pp. 164Google Scholar f.
12 Ibid., pp. 19, 77 f.
13 Examples of this kind of work include Rosen, F., Jeremy Bentham and Representative Government: A Study of the Constitutional Code, Oxford, 1983Google Scholar; Kelly, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice; Lieberman, David, ‘Economy and Polity in Bentham's Science of Legislation’, Economy, Polity and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Collini, Stefan, Whatmore, Richard, and Young, Brian, Cambridge, 2000Google Scholar.
14 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘A Table of the Springs of Action’ (‘Explanations’), Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and The Article On Utilitarianism, ed. Goldworth, Amnon, Oxford, 1983 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 90Google Scholar. Hobbes, Compare, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B., London, 1968, p. 118Google Scholar; ‘[T]he Imagi-nation is the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion’ (ch. vi).
15 Ibid., p. 92.
16 Bentham's definition of law is notoriously expansive – in one version including ‘even the most trivial and momentary order of the domestic kind, so it be not illegal’ (Of Laws in General, ed. Hart, H. L. A., London, 1970 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 3)Google Scholar – and complicated by the fact that he develops a distinction between direct and in-direct legislation that suggests a limited role for the state in tandem with limitless possibilities for governance (see e.g. ibid., pp. 1–9, 62 and 245 f., UC lxxxvii. 2 f., IPML, pp. 281–93, and see note 36 below). Moreover, he dropped indirect legislation as an explicit category even as he became increasingly preoccupied from the late 1780s on with those studies – e.g., political economy, Panopticon, education, religion and constitutional reform – that for the most part fall under it. Technically, direct legislation itself works indirectly by constructing and governing expectations; the civil law especially is concerned with securing the conditions for the transactions that are regulated by it. ‘Bentham concentrated on the development of … instruments of security across a wide spectrum of law and policy. … [He] eschewed simple consequentialism in approaching the complex problems of law and politics. The legislator acted indirectly; he established the framework of security through law and public opinion’ (Rosen, F., Bentham, Byron, and Greece, Oxford, 1992, pp. 34, 36)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My own use of ‘indirect legislation’ borrows and extends the term for a reconstruction of Bentham's project. It denotes the myriad sources, researches, and techniques that Bentham and we develop that can supplement or substitute for the ostensibly more blunt and coercive and therefore inefficient and expensive means of state action. Even in his late work, these supplements might be referred to as ‘law’; see e.g. note 116 below on the public opinion tribunal, which suggests that what we call norms are a kind of law.
17 My thanks to Mark Canuel for stressing that prospects are landscaped points of view. Note also that prospect theory is a branch of game theory.
18 IPML, pp. 11 f.
19 TSA, p. 62 (Marginals: ‘Uses’).
20 Ibid., p. 99 (‘Observations’).
21 IPML, pp. 8 f. My use of ‘logic of the will’ in this essay is much closer to Bentham's ‘thelematology’ or psychological dynamics (TSA, p. 71 [‘Uses’]) than it is to the better-known formal aspects of imperation explicated by H. L. A. Hart (OLG, p. 15n; IPML, p. 299n; Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory, Oxford, 1982, pp. 112–18)Google Scholar. For an expansive and richly documented interpretation that combines these senses see Mack, Mary, Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas, London, 1962Google Scholar; ‘[Bentham] hoped to create a logic of the will, a monumental and fully articulated structure rising from a foundation of fact, individual pleasures and pains, through ever-ascending orders of generality to the crowning abstraction, the normative Greatest Happiness principle’ (p. 3). On thelematology and imperation see ibid., p. 164: ‘In 1831, when he was eighty-three, he made an outline. “In man two faculties. 1. active - the will 2. passive – the understanding. … If to logic of the understanding the name of Noology be given, that of Thelematology may be given to the logic of the will. … Nomography the branch of thelematology which regards expression given to discourse employed by the superior to direct the conduct of the inferior.”’ Citing Jeremy Bentham, Additional Manuscripts, British Museum, 33549, p. 28.
22 IPML, p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 12.
24 I have translated the following from notes Bentham wrote in 1828 under the heading ‘Deontology’: ‘Si le bonheur d'un quelqu'un recoit une augmentation, c'est de l'une ou l'autre de deux manières – 1. par l'augmentation de la somme de ses plaisirs; ou 2. par la diminution de la somme de ses peines.’ Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and The Article On Utilitarianism (CW), p. 340 (‘Appendix B: Definitions’). Interest and happiness have the same make-up, but they are not synonyms. Interest has qualities that make it, rather than happiness, the direct object of utilitarian concern: ‘But on every occasion the happiness of every individual is liable to come into competition with the happiness of every other. … Hence it is, that to serve for all occasions, instead of saying the greatest happiness of all, it becomes necessary to say the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If however instead of the word happiness the word interest is employed, the phrase universal interest may be employed as corresponding indifferently to the interest of the greatest number as to the interest of all.’ Bentham, Jeremy, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. Schofield, Philip, Oxford, 1989 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 234Google Scholar.
25 Two of the most prominent criticisms of Bentham object to what they take to be his views on intra- and inter-personal utility respectively. See Mill, J. S., ‘Bentham’, Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments, ed. Parekh, Bhikhu, 4 vols., London, 1993, i. 158Google Scholar f. and Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA, 1971, pp. 22–7, 33Google Scholar.
26 First Principles (CW), pp. 235 f.
27 OLG, p. 133.
28 Works, i. 308 f.
29 If we must ask what this aggregate interest amounts to, considering that it is made up of such malleable intangibles, all that is clear is that it provides the following directives: (1) alter what works at cross-purposes, but (2) value security of fixed expectations above all else. ‘Bentham … held that there couldn't be a justification in natural law or natural justice of systems of property because what this would really be about was expectation, and expectation was neutral. So what was established might be quite arbitrary. Once this had happened, though, there is a good, non-arbitrary reason for maintaining it’ (Harrison, Ross, Bentham, London, 1983, pp. 255 f.)Google Scholar. Generations of moral philosophers and normative political philosophers have been frustrated by Bentham's minimal attention to their concerns, and by their consequent inability to make clear sense of utility. ‘[T]hese ethical interpretations have obscured or trivialized the import of the principle of utility; they have invariably distracted readers from the purpose Bentham thought his principle would serve’ (Rosenblum, Nancy, Bentham's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge, MA, 1978, pp. 6 f)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This purpose, as Rosenblum suggests, is a governmental one, the rationality of which is closer to early-modern raison d'etat than it is to the principles of normative theory (which is not to say that it is instrumental). But for a powerful new ethical interpretation that acknowledges indeterminacy see Ben-Dor, Oren, Constitutional Limits and the Public Sphere: A Critical Study of Bentham's Constitutionalism, Oxford, 2001Google Scholar. ‘Utility, for Bentham, did not aim at (providing an ideal for the substantive resolution of) moral questions, for example, to justify universally one substantive principle for the distribution of resources or rights. The enlightening thing about Utility was that it invoked, and constantly reverted back to, a basic human condition to explain moral possibilities’ (p. 14n).
30 IPML, p. 34.
31 The great advantage of TSA (the core of which is a table, originally published on one spreadsheet) is that it graphically resolves all of the temporal and causal coufusions that are unavoidable in the more narrative structure of IPML. In this, and in its overall simplicity, it can better serve through its publication as itself an effective piece of indirect legislation.
32 IPML, p. 34 and 34n and Mack, pp. 242 f.
33 IPML, pp. 34 f.
34 For Bentham's plans regarding this text and what was written to follow it, and a statement of the relation between direct and indirect legislation, see IPML, pp. xxxvii–ix and OLG, pp. xxxi–iii and pp. 245 f.
35 IPML, p. 37.
36 This crucial essay of 1782 – the phrase ‘indirect legislation’ is already in manuscript in 1773 – has been published only in incomplete, embellished and retranslated form (Works, i. 533–80 and Bentham, Jeremy, Theory of Legislation, ed. Dumont, P. E. L., trans. Hildreth, R., London, 1882, pp. 358–472)Google Scholar. It comprehends a huge range of functions as functions of indirect government (even as it excludes some of them – e.g., political economy – from immediate consideration). The work throughout is proactive and preventative and includes a sustained discussion of ‘expedients against misrule’ (UC lxxxvii. 102–27) that contains rudiments of Bentham's constitutional doctrine that he did not fully develop until the 1820s. Because its main focus is only one of its stated concerns (delinquency), it has been read mostly as a treatise on crime prevention, but I think this radically understates its importance. It is mostly in Box 87 of the University College London Bentham Collection, but there is additional material under this heading in Boxes 62, 96 and 99.
37 IPML, p. 11.
38 Ibid., p. 37.
39 TSA, p. 76 (‘Introduction’). See Bentham's peculiar twist on Johnson's response to Berkeley: ‘Suppose the non-existence of corporeal substances – of any hard corporeal substance that stands opposite to you – make this supposition and as soon as you have made it, act upon it, pain, the perception of pain, will at once bear witness against you, and be your punishment, your condign punishment’ (Bentham, Jeremy, De I'ontologie et autres textes sur les fictions, ed. Schofield, Philip, trans. Cléro, Jean-Pierre and Laval, Christian, Paris, 1997), p. 182Google Scholar.
40 IPML, p. 38.
41 Ibid., p. 42.
42 TSA, pp. 75 f. (‘Introduction’).
43 IPML, p. 40.
44 But consider the maddening account from First Principles (CW), p. 68: ‘On every occasion, the conduct of every human being will be determined by his own interest [n. “his own interest taken in its most extensive sense, that in which it is coextensive with the whole aggregate of pains and pleasures”]: his own interest meaning according to his own conception of it, to the conception correct or incorrect entertained in relation to it by himself at the moment of action.’
45 This prudence recalls the ‘art of measurement’ of Plato's Protagoras, 356d (Protagoras, trans. Taylor, C. C. W., Oxford, 1976, p. 50)Google Scholar and is a contemporary commonplace; see note 66 below.
46 IPML, p. 74; see also pp. 80 and 96.
47 TSA, pp. 91 f. (‘Explanations’). Missing from this account is any hint of the open-ended and permanent interests that are catalogued in the table correspondent to the catalogue of motives: for example, the ‘Interest of the GALL-BLADDER’ (pursuing pleasures and avoiding pains of antipathy) and the ‘Interest of the PILLOW’ (avoiding the pains of labour) (ibid., p. 85). In the same text in which we find this analysis, then, Bentham prominently deploys ‘interest’ in a way that does not fit it.
48 That we are all always acting on the basis of calculations, no matter what our understanding of circumstances, is central to Bentham's formula. ‘Men calculate, some with less exactness, indeed, some with more: but all men calculate. I would not say, that even a madman does not calculate’ (IPML, pp. 173 f).
49 IPML, p. 215n.
50 UC cxlii. 200. I have removed a second ‘but’ following ‘at best’ in the manuscript. See also Works, i. 194. On the garden metaphor and debates inspired by Ernest Gellner over its meaning see Crozier, Michael, ‘Inter putatorem et vastitatem: The Ambivalences of the Garden Metaphor in Modernity’, The Left in Search of a Center, ed. Crozier, Michael and Murphy, Peter, Urbana, IL, 1996Google Scholar (thanks to Ike Balbus for this reference). Crozier's ideal of a more English garden is close to Bentham's, despite Bentham's tendency here to make a sharp contrast with wilderness. Bentham's wilderness is no raw nature; instead it is improperly landscaped space, shaped haphazardly in accordance with ipsedixitism rather than utility.
51 This possibility is importantly dependent on the rare absence of non-political – e.g., popular or religious – sanctions for particular acts. Landscaping through direct legislation is thus in practice inseparable from the landscaping through indirect legislation that involves the supplementation and co-ordination of other sanctions.
52 IPML, p. 166.
53 Ibid., pp. 303 f.
54 H. L. A. Hart notes the distinction between Hobbes and Bentham on authority in a discussion of the theory of obligation in a command theory of law. Although he is happy to join Bentham in abandoning the civil jurisprudential framework, Hart relies on a tenet of Hobbes's that Bentham's theory is missing and – according to him – requires. This is the notion of an ‘authoritative legal reason’, that a law-making command creates ‘peremptory’ and ‘content-independent’ reasons for its obedience. This is missing in Bentham, but it can't just be grafted onto his jurisprudence. Gerald J. Postema offers an ingenious interpretation of adjudication in Bentham, one that goes some way toward resolving tensions between utility and authority; but he thinks this solution ultimately fails (Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Oxford, 1986, pp. 440–64)Google Scholar. What Hart seems unable to confront is the radicalism of Bentham's attack on the law: ultimately he is not an ally. For Bentham, law in Hart's sense is an obstruction to the reign of interest; it must be conquered and pressed into service as artificial motive and securer of expectations. The law may grow in power, but it will decline in authority. See Hart, especially pp. 253–5.
55 On Bentham and codification, completion, and English legal history see Liebennan, David, The Province of Legislation Determined, Cambridge, 1989Google Scholar.
56 IPML, p. 53n.
57 Ibid., p. 42.
58 The definition of material cited above from IPML, p. 74 – ‘as either consist of pain or pleasure, or have an influence in the production of pain or pleasure’ – is referred back to throughout the remainder of the text. See also the fifth of Bentham's ‘instruments of invention and discovery’: ‘Extension of the use made of the word matter, from the field of physics to the whole field of psychics, or psychology, including ethics and politics’ (Works, iii. 287).
59 TSA, p. 76 (‘Introduction’); IPML, p. 37.
60 IPML, pp. 43 f. and 47 f.
61 Ibid., p. 45.
62 Ibid., p. 48.
63 Ibid., p. 119n.
64 The question of Bentham's relationship to associationism is a complex one. In the note cited above he refers to Joseph Priestley's edition of Hartley's Observations on Man rather than Hartley's own. This is relevant because Priestley's edition omits the extensive account of nervous vibration that in Hartley purports to give a strictly physiological account of the then widely acknowledged phenomenon of the mental association of ideas.
65 IPML, p. 49n.
66 ‘”The greater the degree of affective force or influence with which the future operates in … [men's] mind in comparison of the present, the wider … is the distance between … [his] state of mind … and the state of mind of an inferior animal”’ (UC cxxvii. 288 quoted in Mack, p. 206 [Mack's interpolations]). Thus the primary goal of the moralist and the pedagogue is to get their charges to properly weigh distant future in relation to immediate present pains and pleasures. The notion that this is a crucial component of civilized behaviour and goal of the civilizing function is fairly common in the eighteenth century, but for Bentham it is fundamental.
67 IPML, p. 45.
68 Ibid., pp. 48 f.
69 Ibid., pp. 49n and 45n.
70 For Bentham, what we call social science is always a governmental art and science. Political economy, for example, is to be considered ‘not only as a science but as an art’. And it has a place on ‘the Map of Political Science’, which itself encompasses ‘the entire field of the art of government’ (Economic Writings, iii. 305 and 307). On art and science see Mack, pp. 262–331.
71 IPML, p. 75.
72 Ibid., p. 85n.
73 Ibid., p. 84.
74 Ibid., p. 86.
75 Ibid., p. 92.
76 Ibid., p. 89.
77 Ibid., p. 96. Bentham frequently mixes organic and mechanistic metaphors.
78 IPML, p. 96.
79 Ibid., pp. 96 f.
80 Ibid., p. 97.
81 See the table itself for lists of eulogisms and dyslogisms for each motive (TSA, pp. 79–86). As with ‘interest’, Bentham defines ‘motive’ in a way that should preclude the classification of the general human motives that are displayed.
82 IPML, pp. 97 f.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., pp. 98 f.
85 Ibid., p. 99n.
86 TSA, pp. 89 f. (‘Explanations’).
87 Ibid., p. 90.
88 IPML, pp. 173 f.
89 Ibid., p. 40.
90 TSA, p. 72 (Marginals: ‘Uses’).
91 IPML, p. 99.
92 Ibid., p. 76.
93 Ibid., pp. 99 f.
94 Ibid., p. 11. This paragraph is not given its own number, perhaps because it is itself ‘metaphor and declamation’, inaugurating the antirhetorical rhetoric of the remainder of the Introduction.
95 IPML, p. 203.
96 See the lengthy and fascinating footnote concerning, among other things, the historical relationship between music and bad law (IPML, pp. 22–4).
97 Bentham, Jeremy, A Comment on the Commentaries and a Fragment on Government, ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., London, 1977 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), pp. 491Google Scholar f.
98 I say ‘greater emphasis’ because it was always his concern that the governors be governed as well as the governed; this is the theme, for example, of the chapter on ‘expedients against misrule’ in ‘Of Indirect Legislation’ (UC lxxxvii. 102–27). Here is the Bentham of 1822 on the Bentham of 1776: ‘At that time of day, so far as regards the general frame of the Government, scarcely in any one of those imperfections did the Author of the Fragment see the effect of any worse cause than inattention and prejudice: he saw not in them then, what the experience and observations of near fifty years have since taught him to see in them so plainly – the elaborately organized, and anxiously cherished and guarded products of sinister interest and artifice’ (Comment l Fragment (CW), p. 508).
99 See e.g.IPML, p. 203.
100 The Book of Fallacies is a treatise in the ‘art of government’, not only because its subject is specifically ‘political fallacies’, but because it goes beyond what Bentham sees as the impartial and therefore merely instrumental treatment of rhetoric by classical humanists, who did not distinguish between ‘promoting the purposes of the benefactor, and the purposes of the enemy of the human race’ (Works, ii. 380 f.).
101 Lyons is addressing a somewhat different set of concerns, but his remarks speak to my argument: ‘a social practise of driving on one side of the road rather than the other will be created (or reinforced) and that mode of driving will accordingly be … less hazardous. … The difference of utilities will be brought about by legal sanctions, but the sanctions themselves do not enter into the relevant calculations’ (Lyons, David, In the Interest of the Governed: A Study in Bentham's Philosophy of Utility and Law, Oxford, 1973, p. 61Google Scholar, italics in text).
102 UC lxxxvii. 155–7; Works, i. 55 f.
103 UC lxxxvii. 165.
104 ‘Security depends on the care taken to save from disturbance the current of Expectation’ (UC xxxii. 1).
105 IPML, pp. 144–52.
106 Ibid., p. 159n.
107 Bentham explicitly makes the free market a prime analogy for, and example of, indirect legislation (Works, i. 534; UC lxxxvii. 169).
108 IPML, pp. 178 f. I have left out two parentheticals here that reinforce what I have called Bentham's theoretical legerdemain: ‘(or, in other words, the apparent punishment)’ and ‘(the real punishment)’.
109 Thus he is consistent in abandoning the antirhetorical rhetoric of utilitarian science when writing useful polemics or speeches. For example see Bentham, Jeremy, Securities Against Misrule and Other Constitutional Writings for Tripoli and Greece, ed. Schofield, Philip, Oxford, 1990 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), pp. 74–8Google Scholar.
110 Pitkin, 105.
111 UC xxxii. 149; Works, i. 337.
112 The sinister interest of the ruling class is capable not only of deploying bad direct legislation in its favour, but of generating also a more durable and insidious ‘interest-begotten prejudice’ (Bentham, , First Principles (CW), pp. 180–3Google Scholar; Rosen, , Bentham, Byron, and Greece p. 62)Google Scholar. This is, according to my reconstruction, bad indirect legislation; the prejudice that produces reverence for bad rulers works at cross-purposes with the proper landscaping function of the popular or moral sanction.
113 This governmental strategy of accommodating plural desires while containing plural involvements is manifest in the putatively simplifying assumptions of contemporary rational choice theory. James S. Coleman, for example, insists on this monism of interest for the rational actor, and his is based, like Bentham's, in a relationship of identity. ‘The two parts of the structure of the simplest possible actor correspond to what I have called … the object self (receptor) and the acting self (actuator); interests constitute the linkage between the two’ (Coleman, , Foundations of Social Theory, Cambridge, MA, 1990, p. 504)Google Scholar.
114 These points – that Benthamic interest theory limits the possibilities of conduct by constructing an identity like Coleman's (see previous note) and by foregrounding viscerality – are made by William Hazlitt in the first of his 1805 Essays on the Principles of Human Action (Bristol, 1990). See especially p. 17: ‘The interests of the being who acts, and of the being who suffers, are never one. … My real interest is not therefore something which I can handle, which is to be felt, or seen. … On the contrary, it is … by its very nature the creature of reflection and imagination; and whatever can be made the subject of these, whether relating to ourselves or others, may also be the object of an interest powerful enough to become the motive of volition and action.’
115 I owe this insight to a conversation with Sophia Mihic.
116 As does economy: ‘the economy’ did not yet exist for Bentham and his contemporaries. ‘Culture’ was not yet the abstract noun it would soon become; but part of Bentham's ‘Of Indirect Legislation’ is devoted to ways to ‘culture’ the non-political sanctions (UC lxxxvii. 18–22, 25–8). The label ‘public opinion’ for the popular sanction was first rejected out of a suspicion of the relevance of everything potentially named by it (IPML, iii, 5n), but Bentham later recognized a ‘public opinion tribunal’ in his Constitutional Code: ‘ART. 4. Public Opinion may be considered as a system of law, emanating from the body of the people. … Able rulers lead it; prudent rulers lead or follow it; foolish rulers disregard it’ (Bentham, Jeremy, Constitutional Code, vol. 1, ed. Rosen, F. and Burns, J. H., Oxford, 1983 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 36)Google Scholar. Religion, on the other hand, was problematic in so far as it was a social system: the church establishment, a system that generated sinister interest (see Crimmins, James E., Secular Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1990, pp. 182–201)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
117 This is Lowi's, Theodore J. concern in ‘The State in Political Science: How We Become What We Study’, American Political Science Review, lxxxvi (1992)Google Scholar. Lowi's targets are US public opinion, public policy, and public choice analyses. If he turned to the international scene, however, he might argue that in the emerging post-Cold War regime it is self-styled constructivists of different stripes who are most effectively serving as indirect governors, as the resistance of configurations of state interest and inter-national law is overcome with institutions and norms.
118 Many thanks to Kirstie McClure, Richard Flathman, William Connolly, James Crimmins, Isaac Balbus, Mildred Schwartz, Don Herzog, Elizabeth Wingrove, Meredith McGill, Mark Canuel, and especially Sophia Mihic for comments on drafts of this essay. Thanks also to Fred Rosen and Philip Schofield for their encouragement, and to the staff of the University College London Rare Books and Manuscripts Room for permission to quote from the Bentham Collection.
