Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's Idea of Liberty in Relation to His Utilitarianism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 123 Douglas G. Long. Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's Idea of Liberty in Relation to His Utilitarianism. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Pp. xvi + 294. $22.50. This is an excellent account of the mind and character of Jeremy Bentham, written by one who has an exceptional acquaintance with the great collection in London of Bentham's published writings , correspondence, outlines, codes, notes, and extensive miscellany. Few scholars have had the patience to study this huge file of material, difficult to read and more difficult to organize. Far different from Bentham's formal and pedantic style, Douglas Long's account is a model of orderliness , clarity, and sympathetic exposition. The book deals with the whole of Bentham, not only with his idea of liberty. However, the title is significant, for it suggests that of all Bentham's ideas his idea of liberty is both singular and important. The book explains how and why in government liberty must be subordinated to "peace and security," though it is of the greatest value. The story of how Bentham's philosophy of law changed significantly from his early days of enlightenment by the French philosophes and materialists, to his reaction against Locke's theory of the Social Contract, to his differences with Priestley and other English contemporaries who emphasized "self-government" and to his ultimate defences of laissez faire, as illustrated in his defense of the right to usury and to "freedom of bargaining." But in all these changes he insisted on the rights of "consorial freedoms." Bentham gradually became absorbed in his "deontelogy," his elaborate codes for "indirect government" by the ethics of obligation. Most curious was his passionate propaganda during his last years for the establishment of "panopticons," institutions in which all who needed "observation" or care--the diseased, criminals, insane, handicapped, difficult children, and so on--would live in large public institutions and confinementfor critical and helpful "observation." Bentham believed that the primary reason why government can be lawful and secure is man's "natural" habit of obedience. But the varied kinds of disobedience should be segregated from normal obedience and be given special treatment, instead of being condemned. The lengths to which Bentham went to construct codes for rational utilitarianismmake a fantastic story of Bentham's devotion to order, law, and reason. He justified all this devotion and labor on the grounds that he was promoting the "happiness of the greatest number." Douglas Long's portrait of Bentham is not only thoroughly critical and scholarly, but highly entertaining, the story of a very rare individual. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California George J. Stack. Kierkegaard's Existential Ethics. University, Ala.: Universityof Alabama Press, 1977. Pp. xiv + 237. $10.00. The author opens his preface by referring to the "many forms" the protean Kierkegaard assumes in his writings and by disclaiming any attempt "to have discerned Kierkegaard's vrai visage" (p. ix). Thus, the book is an examination of one, albeit a central, aspect of Kierkegaard's thought, namely, his "'phenomenology" of the ethical stage of human existence. As is we|Iknown, for Kierkegaard the ethical occupies an intermediate place between the aesthetic and the religious. Although Stack almost wholly neglects the latter, he begins with an insightful discussion of aestheticism in relation to Socratic irony and nihilism. He justifies this procedure by appealing to Kierkegaard's view that "an ethical existence is possible outside Christianity" (p. 172). The book is divided into four long chapters. The first deals with the interrelations between ...