Bentham's "Place and Time"

In recent years Bentham scholarship has unearthed a new Jeremy Bentham from manuscript, and this figure is gradually displacing the received Bentham of pre-revisionist research.¹ The effects of new Bentham editing can be particularly dramatic because of the peculiar histories of so many of his texts; he wrote a fantastic amount and only supervised the publication of a small portion of it, and the editor who did the most to make his reputation — Étienne Dumont of Geneva — took great liberties in his successful French-language recensions.² The new scholarship has attacked the image of Bentham as a crude and dull one-size-fits-all rationalist, a portrait effectively drawn by a diverse stable of critics from Karl Marx to Michael Oakeshott and beyond.³ But the piece under consideration here — Bentham's essay on "Place and Time," composed in 1782⁴ — has from the beginning been identified as an exceptional one. Consider the compliments given in an otherwise fairly dismissive and supercilious review, penned by Francis Jeffrey for The Edinburgh Review in 1804, of Bentham's Traités de législation civile et pénale (ed. Dumont), where "Place and Time" first appeared:⁵ "The last discourse, which is by far the most interesting, is upon the influence of time and place in questions of legislation."

After saying very little about it except to lament the lack of space for adequate treatment the reviewer concludes as follows: "The whole of this treatise, which coincides in subject with the great work of Montesquieu, is written with much force of reasoning and vivacity of manner. We...can safely recommend the perusal of it to a larger class of readers than we can venture to bespeak for the rest of the publication."⁶

"Place and Time" considers the appropriateness of legislation across place and time, and the essay does indeed take inspiration from Montesquieu and follows his lead in investigating differences of climate and custom, even as it fiercely criticizes Montesquieu's method. The essay includes Bentham's most extensive discussion of British India, as he mostly considers "place," and his consideration, while wide-ranging, focuses primarily on the circumstances of Bengal, and does so mainly with respect to the promise and peril of exporting reformed or existing English law there. Our aim in this essay is to take another look at this piece on the occasion of its republication from manuscript in 2011.⁷ We consider the text's two previous editions — Dumont's "De l'influence des tem[p]s et des lieux en matière de législation" for the 1802 Traités and Richard Smith's "Of the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation" for the posthumous Works⁸ — and compare them with what has been newly produced from Bentham's manuscripts. In doing so we not only join in the task of revising Bentham in light of his own writing, but reflect on the questions raised by "Place and Time" about uniformity, difference, and hierarchy in the context of empire.

Books and articles interrogating the links between Enlightenment and empire have paid considerable attention to what are now called classical liberalism and classical utilitarianism, and have examined their shortcomings from broadly speaking pluralist perspectives.⁹ For the British context, Edmund Burke is re-emerging as a hero of sorts, even as it is widely agreed that his fierce critique of imperial corruptions and abuses does not amount to outright anti-imperialism. Some recent work has tied Burke's criticism of the corruptions of empire to his pluralism and, to the extent that it opposes Burke and Bentham, extends a tradition of Bentham criticism by contrasting this pluralism to the latter's putative monism.¹⁰ Jeremy Bentham — aspiring "Newton of the moral world," acclaimed "legislator of the world" — is certainly vulnerable to accusations of monism, imperialism, and monistic imperialism. One of us has argued at length that Bentham's reputation for monism and imperialism is greatly exaggerated.¹¹ The reputation has been built by reading Bentham, if reading him at all, back through the...