The Principles of Morals and Legislation. With an Introduction by Laurence J. Lafleur. The Hafner Library of Classics, Number six.

Guter Zustand / good condition. - The work of Jeremy Bentham exerts an influence upon our time perhaps more diversified than that of any other modern philosopher, though during the half Century that followed his death in 1832 it was largely forgotten. Born on January 24, 1748 (February 4 by the Julian calendar then in use), to Jeremiah and Alicia Bentham, Jeremy early showed a precocity which, because it was coupled with an extremely retarded physical development and an unusual tenderness toward men snd animals, made his early life unhappy. At the age of four he was studying Latin; before he was twelve he could write in French more easily than in English and could play the violin ith individual expressiveness. He entered Oxford at the age f twelve, studying law in accordance with his father�s wishes, md graduated at the age of fifteen, paying for his precociousness by a long period of maladjustment. The lectures of Blackstone, the leading teacher in juris-rudencc of his time, left him completely dissatisfied. He as horrified by the evils of legal and political practice; and � he was unwilling either to benefit by malpractices or to untenance them in others, any ordinary career in the law :r in politics was closed to him. It was during his Oxford or post-Oxford days that Bentham l ountered the Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume. Vter reading it he �feit as if scales had fallen from his eyes� ind he �learned to see that utility was the test and measure of iH virtue.� Greatly influenced by this work, Bentham devel-:ed soon afterwards the philosophy he espoused all his life h a consistency unsurpassed in the history of philosophy. bough his principles remained unchanged, he did make many imges in the terminology: what was first called, after Hume, r-ility� became, after Beccaria and Priestley, �the greatest happiness of the greatest number,� and at last in Bentham�s own phrase, �the greatest happiness.� A somewhat similar development occurred in other aspects of the theory � in the number of sanctions reeognized and the names given them, but these changes were actually little more than clarifications. Bentham first applied the greatest happiness principle in his Fragment on Government, published anonymously, and composed as a part of his analysis of Blackstone�s Commentaries. Blackstone was given to haphazard diction and empty or misleading, though melodious, prose. The young Bentham, therefore, had little difficulty in demolishing his opponent�s position. The Fragment was well received and occasioned much speculation about the anonymous author. In time the proud father Jeremiah revealed the truth, and the vogue of the Fragment diminished, for who had heard of Jeremy Bentham? There was, as always, less interest in an unknown author than in an author unknown, whose identity might be speculatively traced to all sorts of interesting people. The work itself, in spite of the later fame of its author, was not republished until 1828, continuing to be little known until 1891 when it was resurrected, for a brief time, by F. C. Montague. Bentham himself had only a poor opinion of the Fragment, referring to the �tone of juvenility and tyroship which will be seen pervading the work.� Still it contained a good deal of important matter, and was, in Bentham�s view, �The very first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammeis of authority and ancestor-wisdom in the field of law.� For his son�s next work, The Defence of Usury, Jeremiah urged publication and Publicity. This essay concerned itself with the hoary, universally accepted theory that money was by nature unproductive: interest, therefore, was bribery and immoral. But laws against interest had proved futile; in practice there prevailed for years a kind of legal compromise with iniquity, the charging of interest being allowed but the rate being limited by law. Even Adam Smith championed this �angement, the unpopularity of which was revealed by the general acclaim accorded to Bentham�s Defence of Usury. It achieved instant success. On the occasion of a parliamentary proposal for reducing interest rates, Bentham, then in Russia, sent the manuscript to a friend in England: it was published in 1787. The proposal, which otherwise undoubtedly would have been passed, died quietly and even its authors acknowledged the greater wisdom of Jeremy Bentham�s position. Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart too were converted. Smith immediately wrote to Bentham and, as a special token of his esteem, sent him a complete set of his own works. The Defence of Usury was translated into many tongues, and ran through many English and American editions. In it Bentham�s style is at its best; and though an early work it is often thought to be Bentham�s best literary expression. For some time Bentham had been at work on his great project: to apply the greatest happiness principle to all social and political problems. It was early .evident that the work would occupy many volumes and would take more time to write than was expected. In 1780, therefore, Bentham printed the first part of his ambitious work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Though printed, it remained unpub-lished, and it is thought that the success in 1788 of the Defence of Usury was what encouraged Bentham to publish his Principles in 1789. Because of Bentham�s peculiar writing habits, his literary work falls into two distinct periods: an earlier one in which he was the sole author of his work, and a later period in which some one eise was associated with him as editor. The second period began with Dumont�s Compilation of Bentham�s notes and translations from previously published works to produce the Traites de legislation civile et penale. No doubt the out-standing success of these works in spreading Benthamism throughout the world, changing his position overnight from that of a minor, hopeful reformer to one of the world�s outstand-ing philosophers of reform, did a great deal to persuade Bentham that his later method of writing was more effective than his earlier one. Also, the arrangement suited his literary prejudices perfectly. He was accustomed to writing daily for as long a time as could be spared from his other duties, and hence his Creative work was unusually prolific. But he found it impossible to revise or edit his material onee it had been written. Therefore, he required and made use of his disciples, who edited his sketches for him. The job was not easy. As Bentham�s mind worked logically, the problem of Organization was not difficult, at least in shorter works, though it reached serious proportions in longer ones. Duplicated material had to be eliminated and any hiatus in the argument supplied by the disciple�s own knowledge, by material from Bentham�s earlier works, or by discussion of the problem with Bentham himself. But the real problem was one of revision. Bentham�s sentences were long and involved; his terms unusual, sometimes mis-leading; his style commonly pedestrian. What Bentham needed throughout the second period of his career was a co-author � not an editor but a disciple who fully understood the master�s philosophy, who had the patience to write draft after draft until the thought was clear and concise, who had the courage to cut and slash when necessary, who would be, not merely a collaborator, but a second mind. This need was not filled and undoubtedly occasioned the notorious failure of one of Bentham�s later works and the gradual exclusion from popu-larity, even among students, of the works of this second period. Bentham is known in our time, apart from his reputation and general accomplishments, chiefly for his earlier works, A Fragment on Government and Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. But these works, too, suffer from disabilities due to the youth of their author, and to their being fragments of much larger plans left incomplete because of the impossi-bility of completing them in a lifetime. Compared to the works of the second period, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is readable, but may not give the reader Bentham�s mature views. The outstanding problem presented to the editor of an edition of this work is therefore to point out how the mature Bentham would have rewritten the work had he undertaken such a task. Were it not for Bentham�s dislike for rewriting his first drafts, the editor�s task would have been easier: as it was, Bentham wrote three series of footnotes to the Principles, which provide the skeleton of our commentary. (Introduction)