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UCL
Bentham Project
CrimRxiv Consortium, Founding Member
The Bentham Project, based within the Faculty of Laws at University College London, has the principal aim of producing a new critical edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. They will make fully available, for the first time, the writings and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)—utilitarian philosopher, legal and political reformer, codifier, man of letters, and social scientist—whose extensive corpus of manuscripts, covering all manner of subject-matters, was written over the course of several crucial decades in British and world history. The Bentham Project uses this CrimRxiv page to share its open-source project, Transcribe Bentham, and its open-access books published by UCL Press. The best place to follow them on Twitter is @TranscriBentham.
‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work‘, wrote the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in 1793. In this spirit, we cordially welcome you to Transcribe Bentham, a double award-winning collaborative initiative which is crowdsourcing ...
An open-access journal publishing original research papers on the life and writings of the utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.
Published: Apr 12, 2024
The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 13 contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known and publishable letters sent both to and from Bentham between 1 July 1828 and his death on 6 June 1832. In addition to 474 letters, the volume contains three ...
Published: Feb 24, 2022
The present edition of Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia consists of fragmentary comments headed ‘New Wales’, dating from 1791; a compilation of material sent to William Wilberforce in August 1802; three ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ and ‘A Plea for ...
Published: Apr 28, 2022
Jeremy Bentham and Australia is a collection of scholarship inspired by Bentham’s writings on Australia. These writings are available for the first time in authoritative form in Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, a volume in The Collected Works ...
Published: Oct 18, 2021
Jeremy Bentham’s ideas on punishment are famous. Every criminology student learns about Bentham, and every criminologist contends with him, as advocate or opponent. This discourse concerns his ideas about punishment, namely with respect to legislation and the panopticon. Yet, ...
Published: Jul 29, 2019
Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of ...
Published: May 11, 2020
Bentham and the Arts considers the sceptical challenge presented by Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism to the existence of the aesthetic, as represented in the oft-quoted statement that, ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of ...
Published: Jun 07, 2017
Among the vast body of manuscripts composed and collected by the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), held by UCL Library’s Special Collections, is the earliest Australian convict narrative, Memorandoms by James Martin. This document also happens to be the ...
Published: Jun 06, 2017
Bentham’s life in the mid-1790s was dominated by the panopticon, both as a prison and as a network of workhouses for the indigent. The letters in this volume document in excruciating detail Bentham’s attempt to build a panopticon prison in London, and the opposition he faced ...
Published: Jun 05, 2017
In 1789 Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which remains his most famous work, but which had little impact at the time, followed in 1791 by The Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, in which he proposed the building of a circular ...
Published: Jun 04, 2017
The letters in this volume document Bentham’s meeting and friendship with the Earl of Shelburne (later the Marquis of Lansdowne), which opened a whole new set of opportunities for him, as well as his extraordinary journey, by way of the Mediterranean, to visit his brother ...
Published: Jun 03, 2017
Bentham’s correspondence reveals that in the late 1770s he was working intensively on developing a code of penal law, but also expanding his acquaintance and, to a moderate degree, enhancing his reputation as a legal thinker. A significant family event took place in 1779 when ...
Published: Jun 02, 2017
The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence ...
