Bentham, torture, modernity

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the relatively little-known and commented-upon writings of Jeremy Bentham regarding the potentially beneficial uses of torture in a utilitarian frame. If, following Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential work on Bentham’s panopticism, the motifs of governmental surveillance, practical intervention into mass behaviours, and institutional diagrams have become some of the crucial themes of sociological and historical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these themes do not quite touch—for a number of reasons discussed below—the new sense that Bentham gives to torture. Moreover, Bentham does so precisely because his reasoning regarding the developmen..