A further prospect for the adoption of the panopticon had been opened by the developing crisis in France. Dumont was now there, effectively working as a publicist for the Comte de Mirabeau, a leading figure early in the revolution. Bentham sought to exploit the suddenly fluid political order to suggest wide-ranging reforms in organization of courts, parliamentary procedure, prisons, political economy and, finally, constitutional law. Briefly, he planned to advocate a massive extension of the franchise in England, but the violent turn of events in France made him an opponent of electoral reform at home for fear of empowering ignorance (see Ch. 7: 135–6). Ironically, just as violence erupted in Paris in August 1792, he was accorded honorary citizenship by the Legislative Assembly. In 1794, he reviewed possible sources of government finance (2019a: 151–262), and developed a proposal devised ten years earlier to generate revenue painlessly by escheat to the state of half the value of estates of those dying childless (2019a: 1–149). Between 1796 and 1798 he developed a plan for provision of poor relief by a National Charity Company, to replace the patchwork of parish authorities holding responsibility under the existing system (2001; 2010a).
In 1799, Bentham finally took possession of a site for the panopticon prison, but the nimbyism of the powerful continued to frustrate attempts to build it. Meanwhile, suspension of payment in specie by the Bank of England in February 1797 prompted him to investigate the supply of credit, and three years’ work produced a detailed proposal for the issue of interest-bearing currency ([2019b]) and a second attempt to distil political economy into a handbook ([2019c5–8]). When Pitt resigned in 1801 Bentham engaged with the new administration, attempting to persuade it of the merits of his currency and of fulfilling the previous administration’s commitment to the prison.
After the definitive rejection of the panopticon plan in 1803, Bentham began drafting the massive, and massively influential, work on evidence edited in 1827 by the young J.S. Mill (1843: vi. 189–585 and vii. 1–598). This work, closely related to his work on logic and justified belief, will not receive detailed attention in this book, but has been insightfully analysed elsewhere (Twining, 1985; 2019; Riley, [2018]). In 1806 he began drafting ‘Scotch Reform’, including a contrast between ‘natural’ arrangement of legal procedure and the existing ‘technical’ arrangement, which was comprehensible, if at all, only to lawyers (1843: v. 1–54), who Bentham was now convinced shared a sinister interest in maximizing their own opulence at the expense of the public. By 1809, the political elite and the King, the ‘Corrupter General’, had been added to the collective ruling few, and a newly democratic Bentham drafted ‘Plan of Parliamentary Reform’, which was finally published in 1817 (1843: iii. 433–552).
In the second decade of the new century, Bentham added the final element to ‘the ruling few’ in the form of the established Church. Over the next decade, he first convicted the Church of England of fostering ignorance and intellectual submission on the part of the populace (2011a), and then expanded his assault to include organized religion in general, especially in Christian form, or ‘Juggernaut’ as he called it. To avoid prosecution, the parts of that assault edited by George Grote (1822) and Francis Place (1823) appeared pseudonymously. The bulk of the assault remains unpublished, although the Bentham Project has made a start on producing it ([2013]; 2014). In the explosive final volume of ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’, Bentham reprised an argument he had made in analysis of penal law in the 1780s (1978), that consensual homosexual sex was a harmless activity, which should not be punished. He went on to argue that contraception, abortion, suicide, and infanticide by mothers should also be permitted ([2013]: 28–56, 59–7, 68–76), and that Jesus himself had probably indulged in gay sex ([2013]: 177–97). He initially proposed an ‘all-comprehensive liberty for all forms of sexual gratification not predominantly noxious’, but, in deference to homophobic public opinion, ended by proposing the replacement of hanging by banishment (2014: 140, 142). Ironically, much of this material was drafted at Forde Abbey in Somerset, the country retreat that he was able to lease for long periods between 1814 and 1818 thanks to the £23,000 he had received in compensation for the abandonment of the panopticon scheme.
In parallel with these works, Bentham substantially redrafted his writings on logic (1997; 1843: viii. 214–357) and composed major works on the detection of political lying (essential in a representative system) (2015), education (1983c) and private ethics (1983b). He also began a campaign to exploit the international reputation he had acquired from the success of Dumont’s recension Traités de législation civile et pénale – translated into several languages and selling 50,000 copies across Europe by 1830 – by offering his services to various governments to codify their laws. He began with the United States in 1811, and responded to President Madison’s tardy refusal by writing severally to state Governors. In 1814 he hoped that Alexander I of Russia might prove amenable, but was again frustrated. Revolutions in Spain and Portugal in 1820 prompted new hopes and new writings (1995; 2012), and he published Codification Proposal, addressed to ‘all nations professing liberal opinions’, in 1822 (1998), when the Portuguese finally supplied the longed-for invitation to draft civil, penal and constitutional codes. Bentham immediately began work on the massive Constitutional Code, which, with various preparatory essays (1989; 1993), occupied the last decade of his life. He continued corresponding with and writing for leaders or aspirant leaders in Tripoli and Greece (1990) and the now independent Spanish colonies in South America, encouraging them to adopt his ideas. The first volume of Constitutional Code was printed in 1827 and published in 1830 (1983a), but the remaining volumes appeared only in the edition of his works published after his death (1843 ix. 333–647).
In relation to British politics, Bentham cultivated powerful politicians who had given indications of pursuing legal reform, including Robert Peel and Henry Brougham. Both were finally condemned as mere tinkerers, recoiling from systematic reform (1993: 157–202; Riley, 2020). Far from being the ‘hermit’ of his own projection, he was unremittingly active in the world of affairs. As detailed by both Dinwiddy (1989: 16–19) and Crimmins (2004: 9–10; 2011: 157–78), he entertained a succession of dinner guests and turned his house into a centre for discussion of radical reform, viewing himself as unofficial leader of radicals in the Commons. One divisive personal influence was John Bowring, viewed by many of Bentham’s friends and supporters as an untrustworthy intellectual lightweight, who had succeeded by relentless flattery and adulation in turning the old man’s head until no criticism of him could be endured. The result was a self-conscious distancing by some of his closest friends and allies, including both Mills.
Bentham died on 6 June 1832, the day after the passage of the Act which ended the worst of Britain’s electoral abuses and set it on the path to representative democracy. He had committed his corpse to dissection for the benefit of medical science in his first will, made in 1769, and it was publicly dissected by his doctor, Thomas Southwood Smith, three days after his death. In accordance with Bentham’s instructions his skeleton, surmounted by a wax likeness of his head,3 padded with straw and dressed in his clothes, took up residence with Smith, before moving to UCL in 1850. Smith had written an article in the Westminster Review, the radical periodical established with Bentham’s financial backing in 1823, on the uses of the dead to the living, arguing that the medical progress was being obstructed by lack of bodies for dissection. Under English law, dissection served as an additional deterrent to the crime of murder, while Christian orthodoxy demanded the interment of an integral corpse to facilitate eventual resurrection. Late in life Bentham wrote ‘Auto-Icon, or Farther Uses of the dead to the living’ (Crimmins, 2002), taking one last opportunity to ridicule lawyers and the Church, and providing considerable evidence of intellectual vanity. Two points might be made: first, ‘Auto-Icon’ constitutes the last salvo in Bentham’s long anti-clerical campaign in favour of a materialist view of the world. A corpse was simply a physical object like any other, and no longer the site of sensations, good or bad. As such, its only immediate use