Jeremy Bentham: Theorist of Publicity

Publicity is a pervasive theme running through Jeremy Bentham's moral, political, and legal theory. Publicity is foundational to his thought. Bentham was one of the first theorists of publicity of the modern era, and surely its most thorough. He knitted together a systematic theory of public reason, integrating utility and law into a complex framework for public reasoning, with a detailed architecture of public spaces, articulating key institutions and incentives for public accountability and public deliberation. This chapter documents Bentham's reliance on the idea of publicity throughout his career and demonstrates its centrality to his moral, legal, and political thought. Like Thomas Hobbes, and for similar reasons, Bentham found the thetic model of law initially attractive; the statute, not rules inferred or constructed from judicial decision, was the paradigm. He insisted that added to formal authenticity and completeness must be the manifested reasonableness of the law's systematically structured directives.