A Fragment on Ontology

Bentham's first published book, carved out of a larger unfinished attack on Blackstone; the 1776 debut that brought him to the notice of reformers and set the course of everything he wrote after.

The theoretical foundation under all of Bentham's legislative projects, printed in 1780 but withheld until 1789; the penal code it was written to introduce was never completed, and the book outgrew the code it served.

A rival judicial blueprint Bentham drew up in 1790 against the French Assembly's own reform draft and sent unbidden to Paris; an early mark of his turn toward democracy, and left unfinished.

A short pamphlet provoked by the Irish budget of 1793 — printed that year, published in 1795, extended in 1816 — and one of the political-economy tracts in which Bentham argued that taxing legal proceedings shuts the poor out of the courts.

An early essay, written about 1782 and left unpublished, testing his science of legislation against the hard case of colonial Bengal; it reached readers first through Dumont's French edition and only later in English.

Transmitted to print through Dumont like his other early legislative writing, this short piece insists that publishing a law — together with its reasons — is a condition of its authority rather than a favour to the governed.

One half of the penal–civil pairing at the core of Bentham's science of legislation; assembled and published in French by Étienne Dumont in 1802, and reaching English readers only through later retranslation from the French.

The source of Bentham's doctrine that security of expectation outranks the other ends of law, and the civil-law counterpart to his penal theory; published in French by Dumont in 1802 and carried into English only by later retranslation.

The work in which Bentham's utilitarianism turns to demolish the doctrine of natural, imprescriptible rights; written in the 1790s against the French revolutionary declarations and first published, in French, by Dumont in 1816.

A collection of Bentham's 1811–15 correspondence with American and Russian authorities, published in 1817; the working papers behind his later Codification Proposal and among the beginnings of the Constitutional Code.

Part of Bentham's late assault on the Anglican establishment: an 1817 tract against the swearing of oaths, above all the religious subscription forced on students at Oxford and Cambridge.

The 1822 pamphlet in which the ageing Bentham offered his services as codifier to any liberal government; it opens his "legislator of the world" years and points toward the unfinished Constitutional Code.

A short 1823 statement, published in The Pamphleteer, of the principles behind Bentham's unfinished Constitutional Code; the clearest brief version of the representative democracy his final years argued for.

Bentham's satirical catalogue of the fallacies used to resist reform, edited from his manuscripts and published in English in 1824 after Dumont's French version of 1816; the most quotable and least systematic of his major works.

A late sign of Bentham's codifying cause gaining ground: his 1826 Westminster Review response to James Humphreys' proposal to codify English real-property law, welcoming it while pressing it further.

An early argument for shedding colonies that his own age passed over: written in 1793 for the French National Convention, held back while Britain and France were at war, and printed only in 1830.

A work his own century treated as utopian: four essays from the late 1780s, printed only after Bentham's death, in which he coined the term "international" and set out an early plan for perpetual peace.

Bentham's theory of how courts should operate, drawn from manuscripts he worked on for over thirty years and published only posthumously; his fullest case against legal technicality and the exclusion of evidence.

A minor scheme from Bentham's 1794 review of possible taxes, proposing to soften a tax by pairing it with a monopoly; unpublished in his lifetime, like almost all of his political economy.

A late unfinished fragment, printed in the posthumous Works, on the craft of drafting legislation — Bentham's catalogue of the faults of legal style and their cures, with an appendix on his own methods.

The unbuilt goal of Bentham's whole legislative project: fragments, published posthumously, toward the foundations of his Pannomion — the single complete code he projected for decades and never finished.

A compact case against excluding any relevant testimony — Bentham's own digest of the argument the young J.S. Mill drew out of his manuscripts as the five-volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827).

Written around 1813–16 with his essays on logic and ontology and unpublished until the posthumous Works; Bentham's attempt at a universal grammar, built on the claim that the sentence, not the word, is the true unit of meaning.

One of the linked essays of the mid-1810s, printed only after his death; here Bentham recasts logic as the art of thinking toward a purpose, and it lays bare the classifying method underlying his whole system.

Constitutional writings Bentham produced in 1822 for Tripoli, at a Tripolitan reformer's request, adapting his checks on misrule — above all a free press and public opinion — to a Muslim state; printed only after his death.

Bentham's principal treatise on political economy, written in the 1790s, first printed in the collected Works of 1843, and given an authoritative edition by Werner Stark in the 1950s; the source of his "be quiet" rule for the state.