Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham is often introduced to students of English literature as the inspiration behind the awful Mr Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard Times (1854), the schoolteacher who believes in nothing but “facts and calculations” and who grinds all the “bumps” off his pupils' souls until they are perfectly flat. If, however, we set aside the conception of Bentham which had become popular by the mid-nineteenth century, he can be seen as radical philosopher who made a very significant contribution to Enlightenment thought. Indeed in 1838, John Stuart Mill, in an essay often very critical of Bentham, offered this praise: “until Bentham spoke out, those who found our institutions unsuited to them did not dare to say so, did not dare conscious