Bentham's Democracy

The publication of Philip Schofield's masterful Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham marks a milestone achievement in contemporary Bentham scholarship. It offers the single most comprehensive, erudite and balanced survey of Bentham's writings on politics now available. In exploring Bentham's political and democratic doctrines, Schofield enters some well-tracked territory. Bentham's programme of political reform, along with his philosophy of law, has routinely provided a major focus of attention for students of Bentham and of the English utilitarian tradition. And Schofield, inevitably and expressly, builds with profit on previous study of Bentham's democratic theory, particularly the ambitious interpretations of Bentham's Constitutional Code by Frederick Rosen and L.J. Hume.1 Still, Utility and Democracy is a distinctive contribution. Schofield approaches his subject as an historian of political thought, seeking to recover Bentham's development as a political thinker and the complex understanding of politics contained in his...