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The Bentham Project is delighted to announce that it has received a very generous private donation to bring to completion the outstanding two volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. The Correspondence is part of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and the first twelve volumes were published between 1968 and 2006.
Volume 13 will cover the last years of Bentham’s life, from July 1828 until his death at his home at Queen’s Square Place, Westminster, on 6 June 1832, and will shed new light on his twilight years. Of wide international renown by the final period of his life, the volume includes correspondents ranging from Daniel O’Connell, who helped in 1829 to secure Catholic emancipation, to the Marquis de Lafayette, and from the Guatemalan politician José del Valle to Andrew Jackson, then President of the United States. Domestically, the correspondence details Bentham’s engagement with, and involvement in, British radical and reforming causes, such as the Law Reform Association and the Parliamentary Candidates Society. Rich in biographical detail, the correspondence sheds light on Bentham’s personal relationships with friends such as James Mill, Francis Place, George and Harriet Grote, and John Bowring, as well as his family, particularly his brother Samuel and nephew George, later a renowned botanist and president of the Linnaean Society of London. Finally, the correspondence includes details of Bentham’s management of his final affairs, including arrangements for the production of an edition of his writings and, after his death, for the dissection and subsequent preservation of his remains as an ‘auto-icon’.
Volume 14 will include over 150 letters which have subsequently come to light after the publication of volumes 1–12, as well as a comprehensive series index.
We are incredibly grateful for this donation, which will allow the Bentham Project to complete the edition of Bentham’s Correspondence, a landmark in historical, philosophical, biographical, and legal studies.
'La figure de Saint Paul dans les œuvres de Bentham sur la religion', ed. Jean-Pierre Cléro—a collection of essays on Bentham's writings on religion and St Paul—is now available online. Featuring work by Peter Lythe, PhD student at the Bentham Project.
A report on the Bentham Project's recent involvement in a collaborative initiative with members of the University of Toronto to create a HTR model in Transkribus for use on medieval Latin manuscripts featuring a high proportion of abbreviations is now available to read online on the Transcribe Bentham blog. Click here to read more.
On 15–16 April 2021, Benjamin Bourcier and Mikko Jakonen are hosting a symposium entitled 'The Making of the Modern International Realm: Hobbes-Bentham', featuring papers by Christian Müller, Mikko Jakonen, and Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak (15 April, 10 am–1 pm CEST); Benoit Walraevens and Jan Eijking (15 April, 3 pm–5 pm CEST); David Lieberman (6:30 pm–8 pm CEST); and Nathalie Sigot, Michael Quinn, and Benjamin Bourcier (16 April, 10 am–1 pm CEST). To register, please contact axel.gougelet@univ-catholille.fr.
- The latest issue of the Revue d'études benthamiennes, on 'Panopticons in Australia' has just been published. The issue includes Dr Tim Causer's article, 'The Norfolk Island Penal Station, the Panopticon, and Alexander Maconochie's and Jeremy Bentham's Theories of Punishment'. Further articles will be added to the issue in due course.
- On 3 March 2021, 18.00-20.00 GMT, the Bentham Project and the DEEDS project (University of Toronto) will host an online launch of their publicly-available and free-to-use handwritten text recognition model for the automated, accurate machine-reading of medieval Latin texts. To register for this Zoom webinar please visit the Eventbrite page. A separate training session will be held on 10 March 2021, 18.00-20.00 GMT, to demonstrate the use of the model. To register for the training session please visit the Eventbrite page.
- We are disappointed to announce that the 16th conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which was scheduled to take place on 29–31 July 2021, has now been cancelled. The next ISUS conference will therefore take place in Rome in 2022. Please subscribe to https://tinyletter.com/ISUS for future updates.
- A recording of Professor Schofield and Dr Tim Causer's online talk of 4 November 2020 to the British Computer Society (Hertfordshire branch), on the work of the Bentham Project, is now available on YouTube.
- The READ project, in which the Bentham Project was a partner and which sought to transform access to the world's archival knowledge through artificial intelligence and machine learning, has been awarded European Commission's Horizon Impact Award for 2020. The award, which received 225 nominations across all disciplines, recognises and celebrates EU-funded research projects whose results have created significant societal impact across Europe and beyond. Read more about the award.
- View the call for papers for , a conference to be held at the Catholic University of Lille, 15-16 April 2021.
- View the recordings from the recent 'Surveillance and Humanities Virtual Conference Series', organised by the Centre Bentham (Sciences Po), in association with the Law and Humanities Research Centre of CERSA (Panthéon-Assas), the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities (ANU College of LAW), and VALE/PRISMES (Sorbonne Nouvelle): https://law.anu.edu.au/event/virtual-conference/surveillance-humanities.
- Professor Schofield's latest article, entitled 'Jeremy Bentham on Freedom of the Press, Public Opinion, and Good Government', published by Scandinavica, is now available to download and to read online.
- Professor Schofield's article, 'Jeremy Bentham: Nothing but pleasure and pain', has been published online by the Times Literary Supplement.
- Bentham and the Arts, a collection of essays edited by Professor Anthony Julius (UCL), Professor Malcolm Quinn (UAL), and Professor Philip Schofield (UCL) has been published by UCL Press. The book can be downloaded as a free PDF, or purchased in paperback (£25) or hardback (£45) from the UCL Press website. You can save 20% on print copies by entering the code UCL20MC99L at the checkout stage (offer expires 30 November 2020).
- Dr Tim Causer's article, '"The Evacuation of that scene of wickedness and wretchedness": Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon, and New South Wales, 1802-3' has been published in volume 21 of the Journal of Australian Colonial History.
- Read a report about from the successful and well-attended conference on Bentham's Political Economy, convened by Dr Michael Quinn, which took place at Bentham House on 16 and 17 December 2019. A wide range of papers were delivered by scholars from around the world, before an interested and international audience. The programme can be viewed on the conference Eventbrite page.
- The Bentham Project is delighted to announce that pre-publication versions of Writings on Political Economy, Volume III: Preventive Police, Writings on Political Economy, Volume IV - Circulating Annuities and other writings on National Debt, and Writings on Political Economy, Volume V - Wealth, Money, and Prices, forthcoming volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by Dr Michael Quinn, can now be downloaded for free. Volume I and Volume II are available from Oxford University Press.
- Thanks to a collaboration with the PRHLT research centre at the Universitat Politècnica de València as part of the READ project, a new and more sophisticated tool for the full text searching of over 90,000 images of Bentham's manuscripts is now available. Thanks to PRHLT's processing of these images using cutting-edge handwritten text recognition and probabilistic word indexing technologies, it is possible to search even pages which have not been transcribed.
- Out now from UCL Press: Happiness and Utility: Essays Presented to Frederick Rosen, edited by Georgios Varouxakis and Mark Philp, in honour of Professor Rosen, the former General Editor of Bentham's Collected Works. The book includes chapters by Dr Michael Quinn, Senior Research Fellow at the Bentham Project, on 'Bentham, Happiness and the Capability Approach', and Professor Philip Schofield, the current General Editor of the Collected Works, on 'Jeremy Bentham and the Spanish Constitution of 1812'. The book can be downloaded for free as a PDF or purchased from the UCL Press website.
- Dr Michael Quinn's paper, 'Bentham on Preventive Police: The Calendar of Delinquency in Evaluation of Policy and the Police Gazette in Manipulation of Opinion, has been published in the International Criminal Justice Review.
- Writings on Political Economy, Volume II, edited by Dr Michael Quinn, the latest volume of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, has been published by Oxford University Press. The volume contains 'Supply without Burthen' and 'Proposals relative to divers modes of Supply', which Bentham drafted in 1794, during an intense period of activity in which he set out systematically to review possible sources of public revenue.
- You can now follow the International Society for Utilitarian Studies on Twitter and Facebook.
- An open-access pre-publication version of a volume of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Writings on Political Economy, vol. III: Preventive Police, edited by Dr Michael Quinn, is now available to download from UCL Discovery.
- The central collection of Bentham's manuscripts, held at UCL Special Collections and The British Library, have now been completely digitised. Read more about the achievement on UCL news or the Transcribe Bentham blog.
- Read a new article in the Journal of Legal History, by the Bentham Project's Chris Riley, entitled 'Jeremy Bentham and Equity: The Court of Chancery, Lord Eldon, and the Dispatch Court Plan'.
- Transcribe Bentham is starting a newsletter. Sign up now to hear how we are progressing in the mammoth task of transcribing Bentham's papers. Expect discoveries made by volunteers and Bentham-related news and events. Sign up.
See previous news and events in our archive.