WEBVTT NOTE 2. Jeremy Bentham: The Utilitarian as Big Brother (continued) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.900 3. Social Utilitarianism 2 00:00:04.900 --> 00:00:11.400 In extending utilitarianism from the personal to the social, Bentham and his followers incorporated 3 00:00:11.400 --> 00:00:18.340 all the fallacies of the former and added many more besides. If each man tries to maximize 4 00:00:18.340 --> 00:00:24.520 pleasure and minimize pain, then the social ethical rule for the Benthamites is to seek 5 00:00:24.520 --> 00:00:30.320 make always the greatest happiness of the greatest number, in a social-philosophic 6 00:00:30.320 --> 00:00:36.960 calculus in which each man counts for one, no more and no less. 7 00:00:36.960 --> 00:00:43.360 The first question is the powerful one of self-refutation, for if each man is necessarily 8 00:00:43.360 --> 00:00:49.160 governed by the rule of maximizing pleasure, then why in the world are these utilitarian 9 00:00:49.160 --> 00:00:56.360 and Philosophers doing something very different, that is, calling for an abstract social principle, 10 00:00:56.360 --> 00:00:59.560 the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 11 00:00:59.560 --> 00:01:06.080 And why is their abstract moral principle, for that is what it is, legitimate, while 12 00:01:06.080 --> 00:01:12.480 all others, such as natural rights, are to be brusquely dismissed as nonsense? 13 00:01:12.480 --> 00:01:17.020 What justification is there for the greatest happiness formula? 14 00:01:17.020 --> 00:01:25.500 The answer is none whatever, it is simply assumed as axiomatic, above and beyond challenge. 15 00:01:25.500 --> 00:01:30.940 In addition to the self-refuting nature of the utilitarians clinging to an overriding 16 00:01:30.940 --> 00:01:38.340 and unanalyzed abstract moral principle, the principle itself is shaky at best. 17 00:01:38.340 --> 00:01:42.540 For what is so good about the greatest number? 18 00:01:42.540 --> 00:01:48.460 Suppose that the vast majority of people in a society hate and revile redheads, and greatly 19 00:01:48.460 --> 00:01:50.820 desire to murder them. 20 00:01:50.820 --> 00:01:55.960 Suppose further that there are only a few redheads extant at any time, so that their 21 00:01:55.960 --> 00:02:02.060 loss would entail no discernible drop in general production, or in the real incomes of the 22 00:02:02.060 --> 00:02:04.900 non-redheads remaining. 23 00:02:04.900 --> 00:02:11.460 Must we then say that it is good, after making our social-philosophic calculus, for the vast 24 00:02:11.460 --> 00:02:18.740 Majority to cheerfully slaughter redheads and thereby maximize their pleasure or happiness? 25 00:02:18.740 --> 00:02:20.900 And if not, why not? 26 00:02:20.900 --> 00:02:27.140 As Felix Adler Reilly put it, utilitarians pronounce the greatest happiness of the greatest 27 00:02:27.140 --> 00:02:33.180 number to be the social end, although they fail to make it intelligible why the happiness 28 00:02:33.180 --> 00:02:38.700 of the greater number should be cogent as an end upon those who happen to belong to 29 00:02:38.700 --> 00:02:40.700 the lesser number. 30 00:02:40.700 --> 00:02:47.480 Furthermore, the egalitarian presumption of each person counting precisely for one is 31 00:02:47.480 --> 00:02:49.380 hardly self-evident. 32 00:02:49.380 --> 00:02:51.660 Why not some system of waiting? 33 00:02:51.660 --> 00:02:59.580 Again, we have an unexamined and unscientific article of faith at the heart of utilitarianism. 34 00:02:59.580 --> 00:03:06.640 Finally, while utilitarianism falsely assumes that the moral or the ethical is a purely 35 00:03:06.640 --> 00:03:10.160 are purely subjective given to each individual. 36 00:03:10.160 --> 00:03:17.320 It on the contrary assumes that these subjective desires can be added, subtracted and weighed 37 00:03:17.320 --> 00:03:23.880 across the various individuals in a society, so as to result in a calculation of maximum 38 00:03:23.880 --> 00:03:26.180 social happiness. 39 00:03:26.180 --> 00:03:33.920 But how in the world can an objective or calculable social utility, or social cost, emerge out 40 00:03:33.920 --> 00:03:40.920 without of purely subjective desires, especially since subjective desires or utilities are 41 00:03:40.920 --> 00:03:49.240 strictly ordinal and cannot be compared or added or subtracted among more than one person. 42 00:03:49.240 --> 00:03:55.200 The truth, then, is the opposite of the core assumptions of utilitarianism. 43 00:03:55.200 --> 00:04:01.940 Moral principles, which utilitarianism claims to reject as mere subjective emotion, are 44 00:04:01.940 --> 00:04:09.420 are intersubjective and can be used to persuade various persons, whereas utilities and costs 45 00:04:09.420 --> 00:04:17.380 are purely subjective to each individual and therefore cannot be compared or weighed between 46 00:04:17.380 --> 00:04:19.020 persons. 47 00:04:19.020 --> 00:04:26.220 Perhaps the reason why Bentham quietly shifts from maximum pleasure in personal utilitarianism 48 00:04:26.220 --> 00:04:32.700 to happiness in the social realm is that talking about the greatest pleasure of the greatest 49 00:04:32.700 --> 00:04:39.300 number would be too openly ludicrous since the emotion or sensation of pleasure is quite 50 00:04:39.300 --> 00:04:44.300 clearly not addable or subtractable between persons. 51 00:04:44.300 --> 00:04:52.300 Substituting the vaguer and looser happiness enabled Bentham to fuzz over such problems. 52 00:04:52.300 --> 00:04:58.300 Boehm's utilitarianism led him to an increasingly numerous agenda for government intervention 53 00:04:58.300 --> 00:05:00.260 in the economy. 54 00:05:00.260 --> 00:05:03.300 Some of this agenda we have seen above. 55 00:05:03.300 --> 00:05:10.580 Other items include a welfare state, taxation for at least a partial egalitarian redistribution 56 00:05:10.580 --> 00:05:17.980 of wealth, government boards, institutes and universities, public works to cure unemployment 57 00:05:17.980 --> 00:05:24.260 as well as to encourage private investment, government insurance, regulation of banks 58 00:05:24.260 --> 00:05:31.180 and stockbrokers, guarantee of quantity and quality of goods. 59 00:05:31.180 --> 00:05:33.580 4. 60 00:05:33.580 --> 00:05:40.580 Big Brother, The Panopticon Utilitarian economists have often been, in 61 00:05:40.580 --> 00:05:47.940 my view, properly accused of trying to substitute efficiency for ethics in advocating or developing 62 00:05:47.940 --> 00:05:55.660 and Public Policy. Efficiency, in contrast to ethics, sounds unsentimental, hard-nosed 63 00:05:55.660 --> 00:06:03.100 and scientific. Yet extolling efficiency only pushes the ethical problem under the rug. 64 00:06:03.100 --> 00:06:10.780 For in whose interests, and at whose expense, shall social efficiency be pursued? In the 65 00:06:10.780 --> 00:06:17.720 name of a spurious science, efficiency often becomes a mask for exploitation, for plundering 66 00:06:17.720 --> 00:06:47.720 In a profound sense, Bentham was a living reductio ad absurdum. 67 00:06:47.720 --> 00:06:55.200 No ad absurdum of Benthamism, a living object lesson of the results of his own doctrine. 68 00:06:55.200 --> 00:07:02.840 It was in 1768 at the age of 20 when Jeremy Bentham, returning to his alma mater, Oxford, 69 00:07:02.840 --> 00:07:09.000 for an alumni vote, chanced upon a copy of Joseph Priestley's essay on government and 70 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:15.960 came across the magical phrase that changed and dominated his life from then on, the greatest 71 00:07:15.960 --> 00:07:19.240 and happiness of the greatest number. 72 00:07:19.240 --> 00:07:25.280 But as Gertrude Himmelfarb points out in her scintillating and devastating essays on Bentham, 73 00:07:25.280 --> 00:07:31.800 of all his numerous schemes and tinkerings in pursuit of this elusive goal, the one closest 74 00:07:31.800 --> 00:07:36.960 to Jeremy's heart was his plan for the Panopticon. 75 00:07:36.960 --> 00:07:42.380 In visiting his brother Samuel in Russia in the 1780s, Bentham found that his brother 76 00:07:42.380 --> 00:07:48.260 Menger had designed such a panopticon as a workshop, and Bentham immediately got the 77 00:07:48.260 --> 00:07:56.340 idea of the panopticon as the ideal physical site for a prison, a school, a factory, indeed 78 00:07:56.340 --> 00:08:00.620 for all of social life. 79 00:08:00.620 --> 00:08:06.100 Panopticon in Greek means all-seeing, and the name was highly suitable for the object 80 00:08:06.100 --> 00:08:08.080 in view. 81 00:08:08.080 --> 00:08:13.360 Another Benthamite synonym for the Panopticon was the inspection house. 82 00:08:13.360 --> 00:08:20.140 The idea was to maximize the supervision of prisoners, school children, paupers, employees, 83 00:08:20.140 --> 00:08:25.660 by the all-seeing inspector, who would be seated at a tower in the center of a circular 84 00:08:25.660 --> 00:08:31.180 spider web, able to spy on all the cells in the periphery. 85 00:08:31.180 --> 00:08:37.020 By mirrors and other devices, each of the spied upon could never know where the inspector 86 00:08:37.020 --> 00:09:02.260 Bentham's apologists have reduced his scheme to merely one of prison reform, but Bentham 87 00:09:02.260 --> 00:09:07.460 Bentham tried to make it clear that all social institutions were to be encompassed by the 88 00:09:07.460 --> 00:09:15.140 Panopticon, that it was to serve as a model for houses of industry, workhouses, poor houses, 89 00:09:15.140 --> 00:09:21.080 manufactories, madhouses, lazrettos, hospitals and schools. 90 00:09:21.080 --> 00:09:27.540 An atheist hardly given to scriptural citation, Bentham nevertheless waxed rhapsodic about 91 00:09:27.540 --> 00:09:33.480 About the Social Ideal of the Panopticon, quoting from the Psalms, Thou art about my 92 00:09:33.480 --> 00:09:39.620 path and about my bed, and spies out all my ways. 93 00:09:39.620 --> 00:09:45.660 As Professor Himmelfarb aptly puts it, Bentham did not believe in God, but he did believe 94 00:09:45.660 --> 00:09:49.340 in the qualities apotheosized in God. 95 00:09:49.340 --> 00:09:56.260 The Panopticon was a realization of the divine ideal, spying out the ways of the transgressor 96 00:09:56.260 --> 00:10:02.980 by means of an ingenious architectural scheme, turning night into day with artificial light 97 00:10:02.980 --> 00:10:09.780 and reflectors, holding men captive by an intricate system of inspection. 98 00:10:09.780 --> 00:10:16.420 Bentham's goal was to approach or simulate the ideal perfection of complete and continuous 99 00:10:16.420 --> 00:10:19.220 inspection of everyone. 100 00:10:19.220 --> 00:10:24.620 Because of the inspector's invisible eye, each inmate would conceive himself in a state 101 00:10:24.620 --> 00:10:33.060 of Total and Continuing Inspection, thus achieving the apparent omnipresence of the inspector. 102 00:10:33.060 --> 00:10:37.740 Consistent with utilitarianism, the social arrangement was decided upon by the social 103 00:10:37.740 --> 00:10:44.440 despot, who acts scientifically in the name of the greatest happiness of all. 104 00:10:44.440 --> 00:10:48.220 In that name, his rule maximizes efficiency. 105 00:10:48.220 --> 00:10:55.180 Thus, in Bentham's original draft, every inmate would be kept in solitary confinement, since 106 00:10:55.180 --> 00:11:01.960 this would maximize his being safe and quiet, without chance of unruly crowds or planning 107 00:11:01.960 --> 00:11:04.340 of escape. 108 00:11:04.340 --> 00:11:10.220 In arguing for his panopticon, Bentham at one point acknowledges the doubts and reservations 109 00:11:10.220 --> 00:11:16.580 of people who appear to want maximum inspection of their children or other charges. 110 00:11:16.580 --> 00:11:23.300 He recognizes a possible charge that his inspector would be excessively despotic, or even that 111 00:11:23.300 --> 00:11:29.880 the incarceration and solitary confinement of all might be productive of an imbecility, 112 00:11:29.880 --> 00:11:36.060 so that a formerly free man would no longer, in a deep sense, be fully human. 113 00:11:36.060 --> 00:11:41.420 And whether the result of this high-wrought contrivance might not be constructing a set 114 00:11:41.420 --> 00:11:45.620 of machines under the similitude of men? 115 00:11:45.620 --> 00:11:50.820 To this critical question, Jeremy Bentham gave a brusque, brutal and quintessentially 116 00:11:50.820 --> 00:11:52.980 utilitarian reply. 117 00:11:52.980 --> 00:11:54.220 Who cares? 118 00:11:54.220 --> 00:11:55.780 he said. 119 00:11:55.780 --> 00:12:02.700 The only pertinent question was, would happiness be most likely to be increased or diminished 120 00:12:02.700 --> 00:12:04.660 by this discipline? 121 00:12:04.660 --> 00:12:09.340 To our scientist of happiness, there were no doubts of the answer. 122 00:12:09.340 --> 00:12:12.860 Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines. 123 00:12:12.860 --> 00:12:17.380 So they were but happy ones, I should not care. 124 00:12:17.380 --> 00:12:23.260 There speaks the prototypical humanitarian with the guillotine, or at least with the 125 00:12:23.260 --> 00:12:26.220 slave pen. 126 00:12:26.220 --> 00:12:32.180 Bentham was only willing to modify the solitary confinement of each inmate in the Panopticon 127 00:12:32.180 --> 00:12:38.620 because of the great expense of constructing an entire cell for each person. 128 00:12:38.620 --> 00:12:45.780 Economy was an overriding concern in running the panopticon, economy and productivity. 129 00:12:45.780 --> 00:12:50.940 Bentham was concerned to maximize the coerced labor of the inmates. 130 00:12:50.940 --> 00:12:53.340 After all, industry is a blessing. 131 00:12:53.340 --> 00:12:55.900 Why paint it as a curse? 132 00:12:55.900 --> 00:13:02.100 Seven and a half hours a day sufficed for sleep and an hour and a half total for meals, 133 00:13:02.100 --> 00:13:08.300 for after all, he admonished, let it not be forgotten, meal times are times of rest, feeding 134 00:13:08.300 --> 00:13:10.620 Banking is Recreation. 135 00:13:10.620 --> 00:13:15.620 There is no reason why inmates should not be forced to work fourteen or even fifteen 136 00:13:15.620 --> 00:13:18.460 hours a day, six days a week. 137 00:13:18.460 --> 00:13:24.300 Indeed, Bentham wrote to a friend that he had been afraid of revealing many of his proposed 138 00:13:24.300 --> 00:13:27.860 savings for fear of being beat down. 139 00:13:27.860 --> 00:13:33.460 He had in mind working the inmates no less than sixteen and a half profitable hours a 140 00:13:33.460 --> 00:13:39.420 of the Day, dressing them without stockings, shirts or hats, and feeding them exclusively 141 00:13:39.420 --> 00:13:45.840 on potatoes, which at that time were regarded even by the poorest citizens as fit only for 142 00:13:45.840 --> 00:13:48.100 animal fodder. 143 00:13:48.100 --> 00:13:53.940 Bedding was to be as cheap as possible, with sacks used instead of sheets and hammocks 144 00:13:53.940 --> 00:13:56.420 instead of beds. 145 00:13:56.420 --> 00:14:02.100 Bentham's overriding concern with economy and productivity is made understandable by 146 00:14:02.100 --> 00:14:09.620 by a crucial element in his Panopticon plan, an element often neglected by later historians. 147 00:14:09.620 --> 00:14:15.260 For the great inspector was to be none other than Bentham himself. 148 00:14:15.260 --> 00:14:21.100 Prisons of the realm and, presumably, eventually, schools and factories were to be contracted 149 00:14:21.100 --> 00:14:27.940 out to Bentham, who would be contractor, inspector and profit-maker from the scheme. 150 00:14:27.940 --> 00:14:33.780 It is no wonder, then, that Bentham had such supreme confidence in the ability of the inspector 151 00:14:33.780 --> 00:14:40.080 to maximize his own happiness along with the happiness of the greatest number of Panopticon 152 00:14:40.080 --> 00:14:43.380 inmates at the same time. 153 00:14:43.380 --> 00:14:48.900 Bentham's long-term gain, if not the greatest happiness of the prisoners, was also to be 154 00:14:48.900 --> 00:14:55.420 insured by long-run provisions that would keep released prisoners in the almost permanent 155 00:14:55.420 --> 00:15:13.420 In Bentham's final plan for his panopticon, no prisoner would be released unless he enlisted in the army, enlisted in the navy, or had a bond of 50 pounds posted for him by a responsible householder. 156 00:15:13.420 --> 00:15:23.420 It must be realized that 50 pounds was a handsome sum at a time when the average unskilled laborer received a wage of about 10 shillings a week, 157 00:15:23.420 --> 00:15:26.420 or about two years' salary. 158 00:15:26.420 --> 00:15:37.420 The bond was to be renewed annually, and any failure to renew would subject the prisoner to be shipped back to the Panopticon, though it should be for life. 159 00:15:37.420 --> 00:15:45.420 Why would any responsible householder be interested in posting a 50-pound bond for an ex-prisoner? 160 00:15:45.420 --> 00:16:03.420 To Bentham, the answer was clear, only if the prisoner was willing to contract his labor to that householder with the understanding that the householder would have the same power over the laborer as that of a father over his child, or of a master over his apprentice. 161 00:16:03.420 --> 00:16:13.420 Since this mammoth bond had to be renewed every year, the ex-prisoner was envisioned by Bentham as a perpetual slave to the householder. 162 00:16:13.420 --> 00:16:23.420 If there was no bond, the prisoner would have to be shipped to a subsidiary establishment, also run on panopticon principles. 163 00:16:23.420 --> 00:16:30.420 And who better to run such establishments than the main prison contractor, that is, Bentham himself? 164 00:16:30.420 --> 00:16:42.420 Indeed, all the conditions of the panopticon were designed to induce the prisoners or other inmates to be enslaved to the contractor, Bentham, virtually for life. 165 00:16:42.420 --> 00:16:44.580 for Life. 166 00:16:44.580 --> 00:16:51.040 In view of Bentham's overriding concern with the Panopticon and of his explicit identification 167 00:16:51.040 --> 00:16:58.640 of himself as the contractor, we must remark on what Himmelfarb points to as the strange, 168 00:16:58.640 --> 00:17:04.840 almost willing inattentiveness of biographers and historians to the most striking feature 169 00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:09.320 of the plan and the decisive cause of its rejection. 170 00:17:09.320 --> 00:17:14.960 To them, Bentham was a philanthropist who sacrificed years of his life and most of his 171 00:17:14.960 --> 00:17:22.120 fortune to the exemplary cause of penal reform, and who was, inexplicably, as one biographer 172 00:17:22.120 --> 00:17:27.040 put it, not to be allowed to benefit his country. 173 00:17:27.040 --> 00:17:32.320 Most books on Bentham, and even some of the most respectable histories of penal reform, 174 00:17:32.320 --> 00:17:38.680 do not so much as mention the contract system in connection with the Panopticon, let alone 175 00:17:38.680 --> 00:17:45.760 Can Identify Bentham as the Proposed Contractor Finally, Bentham's Panopticon was supposed 176 00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:51.320 to be intimately connected with a woodworking machine that his brother Samuel had invented 177 00:17:51.320 --> 00:17:56.480 in Russia about the same time as the Panopticon workshop. 178 00:17:56.480 --> 00:18:02.160 What better use for thousands, if not many thousands, of inmates than to be busily and 179 00:18:02.160 --> 00:18:06.800 cheaply at work making an enormous amount of wood? 180 00:18:06.800 --> 00:18:28.800 Bentham's woodworking machine proved to be too costly to be built and powered by a steam engine, so why not, in Bentham's own terms, human labor to be extracted from a class of person on whose part neither dexterity nor good will were to be reckoned upon, now substituted to the steam engine? 181 00:18:28.800 --> 00:18:34.960 That Bentham scarcely aimed to confine the Panopticon to the class of prisoners is shown 182 00:18:34.960 --> 00:18:39.800 particularly by his Panopticon Poorhouse scheme. 183 00:18:39.800 --> 00:18:48.200 Written originally in 1797 and reissued in 1812, Bentham's pauper management improved, 184 00:18:48.200 --> 00:18:54.080 envisioned a joint stock company like the East India Company, contracted by the government 185 00:18:54.080 --> 00:19:02.840 to operate 250 industry houses, each to house 2,000 paupers subject to the absolute authority 186 00:19:02.840 --> 00:19:09.560 of a contractor-inspector-governor in a building and suffering under a regimen very similar 187 00:19:09.560 --> 00:19:12.700 to the Panopticon prison. 188 00:19:12.700 --> 00:19:17.440 Who would constitute the class of paupers living under the slave-labor regime of the 189 00:19:17.440 --> 00:19:36.440 of Panopticon Poorhouse. To Bentham, the company, of which he, of course, would be the head, would be assigned coercive powers to seize anyone having neither visible livelihood or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood. 190 00:19:36.440 --> 00:19:55.440 On that rather elastic definition, the average citizen would be legally encouraged to aid and abet the coercive powers of the poorhouse company by seizing anyone he considered of insufficient livelihood and trundling him off to the Panopticon poorhouse. 191 00:19:55.440 --> 00:20:02.440 Bentham's envisioned scale of the network of Panopticon poorhouses was nothing if not grandiose. 192 00:20:02.440 --> 00:20:19.440 The houses were to confine not only 500,000 poor, but also their children, who were to continue bound to the company even if their parents were discharged as apprentices until their early twenties, even if married. 193 00:20:19.440 --> 00:20:31.440 These apprentices would be confined in an additional 250 Panopticon houses, bringing the total number of inmates in the industry houses up to no less than one million. 194 00:20:31.440 --> 00:20:50.440 If we consider that the total population of England at the time was only 9 million, this means that Bentham envisioned the confining in slave labor regimented and exploited by himself of at least 11% of the nation's population. 195 00:20:50.440 --> 00:20:59.440 Indeed, sometimes Bentham envisioned his panopticons as incarcerating up to three-fifths of the British population. 196 00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:07.440 Jeremy Bentham conceived of his Panopticon in 1786 at the age of 38. 197 00:21:07.440 --> 00:21:17.440 Five years later he published the scheme and fought hard for it for two more decades, also urging France and India in vain to adopt the scheme. 198 00:21:17.440 --> 00:21:21.440 Parliament finally rejected the plan in 1811. 199 00:21:21.440 --> 00:21:25.440 For the rest of his long life, Bentham mourned the defeat. 200 00:21:25.440 --> 00:21:32.740 Near the end of his life, at the age of 83, Bentham wrote a history of the affair, paranoically 201 00:21:32.740 --> 00:21:39.580 convinced that King George III had sabotaged the plan out of a personal vendetta arising 202 00:21:39.580 --> 00:21:46.780 from Bentham's opposition during the 1780s to the King's projected war against Russia. 203 00:21:46.780 --> 00:21:54.680 The book's title is History of the War Between Jeremy Bentham and George III, 1831, by one 204 00:21:54.680 --> 00:22:01.880 One of the belligerents. Bentham lamented, Imagine how he hated me! But for him, all 205 00:22:01.880 --> 00:22:06.280 the ploppers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been 206 00:22:06.280 --> 00:22:11.520 in my hands. A tragedy, indeed. 207 00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:17.640 Jeremy Bentham started out in life as a Tory, a typical 18th century believer in enlightened 208 00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:24.160 despotism. He looked to the enlightened despots, whether Catherine the Great of Russia or George 209 00:22:24.160 --> 00:22:29.440 and, third, to put his reforms and crank schemes for the greatest happiness of the greatest 210 00:22:29.440 --> 00:22:31.880 number into effect. 211 00:22:31.880 --> 00:22:37.820 But the failure to push through the panopticon soured him on absolute monarchy. 212 00:22:37.820 --> 00:22:43.360 As he wrote, I never suspected that the people in power were against reform. 213 00:22:43.360 --> 00:22:49.040 I suppose they only wanted to know what was good in order to embrace it. 214 00:22:49.040 --> 00:22:54.400 Disillusioned, Bentham allowed himself to be converted, partially by his great disciple 215 00:22:54.400 --> 00:23:01.080 James Mill, to radical democracy, and to the panoply of what came to be known as philosophic 216 00:23:01.080 --> 00:23:02.920 radicalism. 217 00:23:02.920 --> 00:23:08.480 As Himmelfarb summed up the new radicalism, its innovation was to make the greatest happiness 218 00:23:08.480 --> 00:23:14.120 of the greatest number dependent upon the greatest power of the greatest number. 219 00:23:14.120 --> 00:23:36.400 It seems scarcely an exaggeration when Douglas Long compares Bentham's social outlook with 220 00:23:36.400 --> 00:23:42.660 that of the modern scientific totalitarian B. F. Skinner. Bentham wrote toward the end 221 00:23:42.660 --> 00:23:48.340 of his life that the words liberty and liberal were among the most mischievous in the English 222 00:23:48.340 --> 00:23:55.300 language because they obscured the genuine issues which are happiness and security. 223 00:23:55.300 --> 00:24:01.180 For Bentham, the state is the necessary cradle of the law, and every individual citizen's 224 00:24:01.180 --> 00:24:03.860 duty is to obey that law. 225 00:24:03.860 --> 00:24:10.740 What the public needs and wants is not liberty but security, for which the power of the sovereign 226 00:24:10.740 --> 00:24:14.520 and State must be unbounded and infinite. 227 00:24:14.520 --> 00:24:18.180 And who is to guard the citizen from his sovereign? 228 00:24:18.180 --> 00:24:23.920 For Bentham, as Long puts it, by its very nature, the idea of liberty more than any 229 00:24:23.920 --> 00:24:30.680 other concept posed a continual threat to the completeness and stability Bentham sought 230 00:24:30.680 --> 00:24:33.940 in his Science of Human Nature. 231 00:24:33.940 --> 00:24:40.880 The indeterminate, open-ended quality of the libertarian view of man was alien to Bentham. 232 00:24:40.880 --> 00:24:46.680 He sought, rather, the perfection of a neo-Newtonian social physics. 233 00:24:46.680 --> 00:24:52.980 It is certainly apt, if grandiloquent, that Bentham saw himself as the Newton of the moral 234 00:24:52.980 --> 00:24:55.060 world. 235 00:24:55.060 --> 00:25:01.060 The philosophic radicals, despite their proclaimed devotion to laissez-faire, adopted not only 236 00:25:01.060 --> 00:25:06.860 by Bentham's later democratic creed, but also his devotion to the Panopticon. 237 00:25:06.860 --> 00:25:13.940 John Stuart Mill, even when most anti-Benthamite in the course of his eternally wavering career, 238 00:25:13.940 --> 00:25:16.860 never criticized the Panopticon. 239 00:25:16.860 --> 00:25:22.940 More starkly, Bentham's brilliant Lenin, James Mill, despite his eagerness to bury Bentham's 240 00:25:22.940 --> 00:25:30.020 statist economic views, admired the Panopticon with the extravagance of the master himself. 241 00:25:30.020 --> 00:25:35.380 In an article on Prisons and Prison Discipline written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in 242 00:25:35.380 --> 00:25:44.720 1822 or 1823, Mill praised the Panopticon to the skies as perfectly expounded and proved 243 00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:47.900 on the great principle of utility. 244 00:25:47.900 --> 00:25:53.780 Every aspect of the Panopticon received Mill's plaudits, the architecture, the hammocks instead 245 00:25:53.780 --> 00:26:00.080 of Beds, the All-Seeing Inspection, the Labor System, the Contract System, the Perpetual 246 00:26:00.080 --> 00:26:03.200 Slavery of the Released Prisoners. 247 00:26:03.200 --> 00:26:08.940 Mill's lavish praise was private as well as public, for in a letter to the editor of the 248 00:26:08.940 --> 00:26:15.220 Encyclopedia, Mill insisted that the Panopticon appears to me to approach perfection.