The Panopticon Reviewed: Sentimentalism and Eighteenth-Century Interiority

This essay aims to correct two related errors in the way eighteenth-century literature and social thought are typically received today. Jeremy Bentham is often evoked as a prophet of the surveillance State, his panopticon offering an early model for the centralized control and internalized authority of modern disciplinary power. As a corrective, this essay seeks to recover the way Bentham's key psychological ideas grew out of earlier sentimental theory, which, especially in the work of Adam Smith and Samuel Richardson, stressed a dialectical and ludic relationship between society and the individual. Restoring Bentham to his sentimental context, in turn, allows one to read his predecessors without the contemporary discursive overlay that has sometimes been applied to them retroactively.