QI The Book of the Dead

even his closest allies thought it a bit complicated to apply in real life.

    The establishment saw Bentham as deeply dangerous. His ‘algebra of utility’ seemed to eat like an acid through centuries of accumulated privilege and injustice. He opposed slavery, and jboth capital and corporal punishment; he believed in equal rights for women, and for animals; he called for the decriminalising of homosexuality; he praised free trade and the freedom of the press; he supported the right to divorce and urged the separation of church and state. Most of what we now call liberalism can be traced back to Bentham. Many other people – not least William Blake – espoused the very same causes, but utilitarianism provided the legal and philosophical principles upon which liberal democracy would be founded. In his lifetime Bentham was much more influential outside Britain: in 1804 Napoleon transformed the European legal system with his Code Napoleon , based on Bentham’s ideas.
    In Bentham’s view, English case law, which was administered by judges, had a poor record in delivering justice. He pointed to the absurdity and viciousness of over 200 separate offences being punishable by death, including ‘breaking and entering by a child under ten’ and homosexuality.
    As well as intellectual acumen, Bentham’s other weapon was his work-rate. He cultivated friendships – by letter, as he disliked meetings – with the great and the good: from Catherine the Great of Russia to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the newly independent United States; from Francisco da Miranda, the Latin American revolutionary, to Talleyrand, the French master statesman. His ideas were so admired in France that in 1792 he was made an honorary citizen.
    Nor did he confine his work to abstract theory. He designed a prison: the Panopticon (‘see-everything’) whose revolutionarycircular design gave prisoners a reasonable amount of space in their cells, but allowed both gaolers and inmates to be seen from a central viewing area. This allowed one person, the prison warden, to keep an eye on everything that happened. The fact that everyone was under constant surveillance would, Bentham thought, allow the prison to function efficiently and peacefully and make its design applicable to lunatic asylums, schools and hospitals. The Panopticon influenced the layout of penal institutions all over the world, including those at Pentonville in London and Joliet Prison in Illinois. Bentham also made practical suggestions for electoral reform, all later adopted, including universal suffrage and the secret ballot. In Defence of Usury (1787) he persuaded his friend Adam Smith to accept the charging of interest on loans. The writer G. K. Chesterton called this ‘the very beginning of the modern world’.
    Despite his relatively low profile in the Anglo-Saxon world at the time, Bentham could make a serious claim to be the most influential philosopher since Aristotle. And he may yet have more surprises in store for us. As he produced, without fail, fifteen to twenty pages of notes every day, he left an archive of more than 5 million manuscript pages behind him, fewer than half of which have ever been published. The Bentham Project at University College, begun in 1968, is now up to twenty-five volumes.
    The regularity and sheer pace of his work life protected Bentham from social engagements, which he avoided as hard as he could. He didn’t need company, describing himself as being ‘in a state of perpetual and unruffled gaiety’. This, and his personal fortune, meant he could pick and choose the people he associated with. He refused to see the French intellectual and writer Madame de Staël (1766–1817) when she asked to meet him,saying she was nothing more than a ‘trumpery magpie’. He once met Dr Johnson but declared him to be ‘a pompous vamper of commonplace morality’. Apart from two early dalliances, he seemed to have no intimate dealings with women, although even at the end of his life, memories of his romantic youth would quickly move him to tears. ‘Take me forward, I entreat you, to the future,’ he would beg his guests. ‘Do not let me go back to the past.’ He did occasionally allow friends to dine with him, making lists of conversational topics beforehand. At ten o’clock, he took tea. At eleven, a nightcap of half a glass of Madeira, the only alcohol he ever drank. By twelve, his guests would find themselves unceremoniously ejected. He