page_title: The Spirit of the Age
section_title: Jeremy Bentham
hierarchical_section_title: The Spirit of the Age / Essays / Jeremy Bentham
caption_attribution_description: English: Plan of the Panopticon
context_page_description: The Spirit of the Age is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly The New Monthly Magazine in 1824, the essays were collected with several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825.
  The Spirit of the Age was one of Hazlitt's most successful books. It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece, even "the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism." Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays.
context_section_description: Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social and legislative reformer. He was a major proponent of Utilitarianism, based on the idea of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number", which he was the first to systematise, introducing it as the "principle of utility". Hazlitt's link with Bentham was unusual, as Bentham was his landlord and lived close by. Bentham would sometimes take his exercise in his garden, which was visible from Hazlitt's window. The two were not personally acquainted, yet what Hazlitt observed enabled him to interweave personal observations into his account of the older man.
  Bentham was a representative of the reformist element of the time. Yet, also symptomatic of "the spirit of the age"—and the note Hazlitt strikes on the opening of his sketch—was the fact that Bentham had only a small following in England, yet enjoyed respectful celebrity in nations half a world away. "The people of Westminster, where he lives, hardly dream of such a person ...." "His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chili and the mines of Mexico."
  Hazlitt notes Bentham's persistent unity of purpose, "intent only on his grand scheme of Utility .... [r]egarding the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He meditates the coming age .... he is a beneficent spirit, prying into the universe ...."
  But Hazlitt soon qualifies his admiring tone. First, he cautions against mistaking Bentham for the originator of the theory of utility; rather, "his merit is, that he has brought all the objections and arguments, more distinctly labelled and ticketed, under this one head, and made a more constant and explicit reference to it at every step of his progress, than any other writer."
  As Bentham's thinking gained complexity, his style, unfortunately, deteriorated.  "It is a barbarous philosophical jargon" even though it "has a great deal of acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you could. ... His works have been translated into French", quips Hazlitt. "They ought to be translated into English."
  Bentham's refined and elaborated logic fails, in Hazlitt's assessment, to take into account the complexities of human nature. In his attempt to reform mankind by reasoning, "he has not allowed for the wind ". Man is far from entirely "a logical animal", Hazlitt argues. Bentham bases his efforts to reform criminals on the fact that "'all men act from calculation'". Yet, Hazlitt observes, "it is of the very essence of crime to disregard consequences both to ourselves and others."
  Hazlitt proceeds to contrast in greater detail the realities of human nature with Bentham's benevolent attempts to manipulate it. Bentham would observe and attempt to alter the behavior of a criminal by placing him in a "Panopticon, that is, a sort of circular prison, with open cells, like a glass bee-hive." When the offender is freed from its restraints, however, Hazlitt questions whether it is at all likely he will maintain the altered behavior that had seemed so amenable to change. "Will the convert to the great principle of Utility work when he was from under Mr. Bentham's eye, because he was forced to work when under it? ... Will he not steal, now that his hands are untied? ... The charm of criminal life ... consists in liberty, in hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death, in one word, in extraordinary excitement".
  Further, there is a flaw in Bentham's endlessly elaborating on his single idea of utility. His "method of reasoning" is "comprehensive ..." but it "includes every thing alike. It is rather like an inventory, than a valuation of different arguments." Effective argument needs more colouring. "By aiming at too much ... it loses its elasticity and vigour". Hazlitt also objects to Bentham's considering "every pleasure" as "equally a good". This is not so, "for all pleasure does not equally bear reflecting on." Even if we take Bentham's reasoning as presenting "the whole truth", human nature is incapable of acting solely upon such grounds, "needi
caption: Panopticon
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