by Roy Porter
In 1780 Priestley took up residence in Birmingham, joining the Lunar Society. Living in the new industrial heartlands, he grew warmly sympathetic towards the laissez-faire attitudes of the Midlands industrialists. He then criticized the Poor Laws, which in his view had ‘debased the very nature of man… defeated the purposes of Providence with respect to him, and… reduced him to a condition below that of any of the brutes’.97 While he warned against centralizing legislation, on social discipline Priestley proved stern. Capital punishment, solitary confinement and meagre diets could all be effective utilitarian deterrents; and since prevention was the point of punishment, at bottom it was better that the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.
Crucial to his later politics was the French Revolution: as British opinion hardened, Priestley grew more radical. As is clear from his Letters to Edmund Burke Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) and his anonymous A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government of the same year,98 he had ceased to think of the British as the best of constitutions, while the Anglican Church now seemed a ‘fungus upon the noble plant of Christianity’.99 Abandoning the view that sovereignty lay in the balance of king, Commons and Lords, ‘our only proper sovereign’, he now held, ‘is the Parliament’.100 Hereditary titles and kingship were feudal relics which must fall before the ‘prevailing spirit of industry and commerce’.101 Long ‘a Unitarian in religion but a Trinitarian in politics’, he now paraded as a Unitarian in both: ‘in every state as in every single person there ought to be but one will’,102 and that was the people's: reform the House of Commons and ‘every other reform could be made without any difficulty whatever’.103 Denouncing in his Letter to Pitt (1787) the Prime Minister's failure to relieve the Nonconformists by abolishing the Test Acts, Priestley scorned his kowtowing to the bishops, who were ‘recorded in all histories, as the most jealous, the most timorous, and of course the most vindictive of all men’.104 Such inflammatory statements made enemies aplenty.
On 14 July 1791 a dinner was organized in Birmingham – Priestley was not himself present – by ‘Friends of the Revolution’ to commemorate the storming of the Bastille. With the connivance of the authorities, a mob chanting ‘Damn Priestley' stormed and burned the local Dissenting chapels, before turning on Priestley's own house, destroying his library and laboratory. The French duly honoured him with a seat in the National Assembly, but this hardly enhanced his popularity back home, especially after France's declaration of war in 1793. And so, in 1794, Priestley sailed for America, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Though he failed to gain a permanent congregation – Unitarianism was also regarded as suspect in America – he did deliver a series of Socinian lectures, published in Discourses Relating to the Evidence of Revealed Religion (1794–9). 105 Alarmed by the political intolerance he encountered in the New World as well (and finding good servants hard to come by), Priestley, with his habitual candour, told his hosts that there was ‘less virtue as well as less knowledge in the United States than in most European countries’.106
Before Priestley went west, he had explicated the ‘second coming’: ‘The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies’ (1794) expressed his persuasion ‘that the calamitous times foretold in the Scriptures are at hand’. Study of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel led him to anticipate Christ's return within twenty years: ‘I take it that the ten horns of the great beast in revelations, mean the ten crowned heads of Europe,’ he explained, ‘and that the execution of the king of France is the falling off of the first of those horns’, while Nelson's victories fulfilled Isaiah's prophecies. Normal in the age of Newton, such immersion in the prophetic books was becoming an anachronism.107
Bold, energetic and plain-speaking, Priestley embodied the ultimate plain man's Enlightenment: truth was simple, open to all. His commitment to natural rights jibed with his utilitarianism, and both served the overriding goal of improvement. His liberalism, which preached freedom from state tyranny, priests and superstition, went with an endorsement of new institutions – factories, gaols, schools, hospitals – meant to instruct and discipline. In the fight against the mystifications of power, materialism promised a future in which science would deliver happiness to the people.108 Paramount in all this was mental autonomy: ‘should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself,’ he reflected,
it ought not, on that account, to be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true; and if it fall before the influence of free inquiry, it can only do so in consequence of its not being true.109
Such statements epitomized the Dissenting politics of candour and impartiality: truth would prevail given fair opportunities, liberty would bring enlightenment, and enlightenment abet mankind.110 The Providentialist in Priestley was also confident that out of discord unity would ultimately emerge: ‘The consequence of free discussion,’ he wrote in 1787, ‘would in time, produce a rational and permanent uniformity. For truth, we need not doubt, will finally prevail in every contest.’111
The call for reform came in many different guises, with different idioms and priorities, though all had much in common. Perhaps the most systematically radical of the late Enlightenment reformers was Jeremy Bentham, whose exceptionally lengthy life was single-mindedly devoted to the reform, first and foremost of the law (where ‘all is darkness’) but also of the State, according to the criterion of utility.112
The son of a Tory lawyer, after attending Westminster school Bentham went up to Oxford as a 12-year-old stripling in 1760. Upon graduating, he enrolled at Lincoln's Inn, briefly returning, however, to his alma mater to hear the lectures of the celebrated professor of law William Blackstone. Published anonymously in that annus mirabilis 1776, Bentham's first work, the Fragment on Government, debunked the jurist's complacent paeans to the British constitution and common law.113 While attracting only passing interest, the pithy, witty Fragment was fundamental to Bentham's project, since it formulated the principle of utility which drove all his later theorizing:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of senses, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.114
While Bentham elaborated these archetypal enlightened views over the course of the next half century, training his searchlight into the shadowy recesses of power and the law, his basic principles never wavered.
The proper goal of society was the happiness of its members, and it was the legislator's job to aid that end.115 Well-being consisted in maximizing individual pleasure and minimizing pain. Government should ensure the welfare of all, each person counting equally, be he patrician or pleb. The securing of the happiness of the greatest number was to be achieved through a proper mixture of personal freedom and administrative measures. Fundamental to state policy were security of the person and property. Also important was parity of treatment and of fortunes. Other things being equal, equality maximized public happiness, because all had a comparable capacity to experience pleasure and pain; with inequality, each additional unit of wealth brought diminishing returns. Absolute equality was unnatural, however, on account of differentials in talents, industry, etc. – nor was confiscation the way to maximize utility or pleasure, owing to the pain felt by losers and the alarm
spread in the community if property were rendered precarious. Attacks on security were, after all, attacks on expectation, that imaginative chain which bound the present to the future. Security was thus a primary goal, although gross inequalities could be whittled away over time.
Government, which was to serve the people, needed to be transparent and accountable. The glare of publicity would protect subjects against misrule. Government must create a system which harmonized interests, using the law to ensure the coalescence of interest and duty. Laws must engage with motives – hence it was crucial that those ‘springs of action’ be thoroughly analysed and classified in the creation of a ‘logic of the will’.116 Sanctions – sources of pleasure or pain inducing men to act in certain ways – came in five sorts: physical, political, moral (or popular), religious and sympathetic. Only the political sanction was directly in the sovereign's hands, but the State also had at its disposal indirect means of persuasion, like public opinion.
It was up to government, manipulating the system of sanctions, to provide a framework of laws and punishment which would expedite optimal individual action. But though everyone potentially knew his own interest, the uneducated, like children, seeing no further than their noses, would grab opportunities to steal or squander without regard to the future. Education, discipline and the law were therefore necessary. Primarily an engine of social control, the law must be both knowable and known; all must understand that infractions would be detected and punished.
A true child of the Enlightenment, Bentham believed power had ensconced itself by mystification. Monarchy, the Church, the peerage and the professions – all had cooked up self-serving mythologies: Divine Right, the ancient constitution, theology, ritual, precedent. Especially obnoxious was the lawyer's worship of the tyranny of tradition: ‘Ah! when will the yoke of custom – custom, the blind tyrant of which other tyrants make their slave – ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off? – When will Reason be seated on her Throne?’117
Power must be scrutinized, fictions exposed. The pleasure–pain nexus was real, however, because it was grounded in human nature. The greatest happiness of the greatest number was the only scientific measure of right and wrong. All other criteria (convention, contract, honour, divine will, and so forth) either ultimately boiled down to variants on utility or were mendacious blather: even the rights of man were a kind of nonsense.118 Every social arrangement had to be appraised in terms of its consequences – its happiness-producing tendency. Hence, in drawing up laws, the statesman had to take dispositions and intentions into account.119
This is why Bentham believed the analysis of motives so important. At bottom, all sanctions were reducible to the physical, that is, expectations of calculable pleasures and fears of tangible pains. The cash value of a pleasure or a pain would vary according to its intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity (its likelihood of being followed by sensations of the same kind) and purity (the probability of not being followed by sensations of the opposite type).120 A comprehensive knowledge of what moved men would be the grounding of a science of the law.
Bentham revered all the canonical Enlightenment heroes, notably Bacon: ‘fiat lux,’ cried Bentham, ‘were the words of the Almighty: – Fiat experimentum, were the words of the brightest genius he ever made’.121 Locke was another of his idols, as was Helvétius: ‘A digest of the laws is a work that could not have been executed with advantage before Locke and Helvétius had written’, for both had exposed the witchery of words.122 And his philosophical radicalism patently embodied key enlightened values.
Like others from Locke to Horne Tooke, Bentham abhorred loose language, creating, to rectify this, a new lexicon of law and politics. Ironically, however, his quest for precision involved obscure neologisms and linguistic solipsism, leading Hazlitt to quip that Bentham ought to be translated into English.123
He was furthermore an unabashed materialist, denying the superiority of the so-called spiritual over the physical – ‘quantities of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry’ – and betraying none of the Christian humanist aversion to sensory hedonism.124 A cash value could be put on everything. Bentham's materialism shows in his attitude towards the disposal of his own body – a contentious issue.125 Early in life Bentham had directed that his corpse should be dissected ‘if I should chance to die of any such disease’ whose study would advance ‘the art of Surgery or science of Physic’. Later, he conducted investigations into embalming techniques, leading to his Auto-icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living (1831). In the form of the ‘auto-icon’, the stuffed bodies of great men should be put on show as edification and the process would be cheaper than carving statues.126
Bentham was a staunch individualist. Happiness was the individual's aim; everyone knew best where his own happiness lay; and, ceteris paribus, government or society should interfere as little as possible. He thus endorsed the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, trusting to a natural market-place identification of interests. Whilst suspicious of natural rights theories (‘nonsense on stilts’), he reach conclusions similar to Priestley as to the paramountcy of individual liberty, and, as already discussed, he sought a liberalization of the laws regulating sexuality.127
Loathing privilege, Bentham detested the Christianity of the churches. Organized religion was despotism and theology was bunk. ‘A man who after reading the scriptures can bring himself to fancy the doctrines of the Athanasian Creed,’ he declared in 1777, was in a ‘state of prepared imbecility’.128 In time-honoured Deist fashion, Not Paul but Jesus, published over forty-five years later, proved the apostle an impostor,129 while, around the same time, Bentham also denounced ‘cold, selfish, priest-ridden, lawyer-ridden, lord-ridden, squire-ridden, soldier-ridden England’.130
Benthamism was a philosophy of action par excellence; alongside the Poor Laws (see chapter 16 above), the chief crusade to which Bentham devoted himself was prison reform, by then a major cause for concern. As noted in chapter 9, the British penal system was a prime target for criticism: there was little rationality in the statute book, in the sentences of the Bench, or in punishments like the pillory – justice was a whimsical mix of brutality and mercy. The severity of the penal code was counter-productive, especially in view of its arbitrariness, and gaols were ‘schools of vice’.131 Confusion, reformers argued, must be replaced by consistency, and physical punishments reinforced by psychological sanctions.
In response to such critiques, late in the century the modern prison began to be devised, its advocates, like those of workhouses and lunatic asylums, displaying an ardent faith in salvation by bricks and mortar. With the old lock-ups denounced as dens of depravity and disease, new model prisons – efficient, disciplined, accountable, economical – were touted as the solution to the problems of criminality. Long-term prison sentences, reformers taught, would finally deliver authentic punishment, because they took away that sweetest of the rights of man: liberty. For that same reason, they would deter. And most important of all, they would rehabilitate. Whereas the traditional menu of corporal and capital punishments was brutalizing, the carefully calibrated regime of the new purpose-built and scientifically administered penitentiary would mould men anew, replacing caprice, cruelty and corruption by the application of ‘a just measure of pain’.132
Some reformers, notably religious Evangelicals like Jonas Hanway and John Howard, pinned their hopes on the ‘separate system’, securing prisoners in solitary confinement, enforcing silent segregation. Traditional prisoner subcultures would thereby be crushed, criminality would cease to be contagious and solitude would work a change of heart.
Bentham shared many, but not all, such views, setting out his own via the architectural jewel of the Panopticon, ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’. The basic structure of this building was to be circular or polygonal, with cells around the circumference. At the core would be a central inspection area of galleries and
lodge, from which authority could exercise constant surveillance while remaining itself invisible. High-tech building methods would make this possible. The pillars, arches, staircases and galleries were to be made of cast iron, for it was lighter, more flexible, less bulky and perhaps cheaper than stone or brick. Also, it would not harbour putrid infection and was fire-resistant. Glass was to be used extensively, in skylights, and there would be two large windows for each cell. The penitentiary's distinctive design, with its central conning-station (the spider in the web) ensuring the complete visibility of all prisoners, each in his own cell, aimed to achieve absolute control and regularity through total surveillance.133
No less important was the programme of management. Convicts would be worked extremely hard – by way of punishment, to meet the costs of their crime, and to instil discipline. An inmate would work fourteen hours a day at sedentary labour and spend one and a half hours eating his two meals a day, half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner: no ‘particle’ of time would be unaccounted for – and convicts would be under constant surveillance. The scheme – a ‘mill for grinding rogues honest’134 – embodied utilitarian simplicity: ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – economy seated as it were upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor Laws not cut but untied – all by simple Idea in Architecture!’135
Bentham submitted three utilitarian criteria for prison administration: leniency (a convict ought not to suffer bodily in ways prejudicial to health or life); severity (the prisoner's condition ought not to be more eligible than that of paupers); and economy (saving those reservations, economy must prevail).136 Humanity and efficiency were thus meant to go hand in hand.137