English law in the 1760s had an admirer and no critic. William Blackstone's Oxford lectures, the most celebrated legal teaching in the country, presented the common law as something close to finished: its fictions were wisdom, its savagery was inheritance, and its authority rested on an original contract nobody had ever signed. Sitting in that audience in 1763 was a boy of fifteen, sent up to Oxford at twelve, who heard in it fallacy dressed as reverence.
Bentham spent the next sixty-nine years supplying what Blackstone had made unnecessary: a standard by which a law could be called bad. The standard was consequences. A statute, a punishment, a court procedure, an institution — each is a machine for producing happiness or misery, and the only honest question to ask of it is which, and how much, and for whom. Nothing else counts: not custom, not the dignity of the profession, not the fact that it had always been done. Describing the law as it stands is one job; judging it is another, and almost nobody in England was doing the second.
His father, an attorney, had raised him to become Lord Chancellor. He was called to the bar in 1769, took one brief, and never practised. Instead he wrote — and mostly did not publish. A Fragment on Government appeared anonymously in 1776 and was attributed to Lord Mansfield, to Lord Camden, to the great advocate John Dunning; it sold until his father proudly revealed that the author was his son, at which point interest collapsed. The book carrying his full theory, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, sat printed and unissued for nine years before he let it out in 1789.
The method was demolition. Words like right, obligation and duty name nothing you can point to, so he insisted they be cashed out into the pains and pleasures of actual people or dropped. Natural rights failed that test entirely; he treated them as rhetoric with no referent, in the same years the French were founding a revolution on them. The test also cut in directions nobody expected: it made the relevant question about an animal not whether it could reason but whether it could suffer, and it made the criminalisation of homosexuality indefensible — an argument he wrote out around 1785, did not publish, and which stayed unpublished until 1978.
The panopticon then took twenty years. A prison designed so that inmates could be watched without knowing when, it consumed his fortune and his attention: he bought the Millbank site for £12,000 in 1799, the government abandoned the scheme in 1803, and it paid him £23,000 a decade later. He concluded that the obstruction had a shape — the vested interests of the governing classes, which he called sinister interest. The man who had spent his life reforming the law from outside politics became, at sixty, a democrat, arguing for annual parliaments, the secret ballot, near-universal suffrage, and the vote for women.
Victorian legislation carried out a great deal of what he had proposed. His philosophy fared more roughly: John Stuart Mill began repairing it almost at once, and the objection that adding up satisfactions ignores the separateness of the people they belong to has never been answered to everyone's satisfaction. His body sits in a case at University College London, dissected and displayed by his own instruction. His papers are less settled: some 60,000 folios remain at UCL, perhaps thirty million words, still being transcribed.