Bentham Seminar: Dr Angela Marciniak on Bentham's political theory

Dr Angela Marciniak (Gießen University)

Jeremy Bentham's Political Political Theory: Towards a Political Theory of Public Policy

Western representative democracy is in crisis. The last U.S. presidential election, the Brexit referendum and the rise of right-wing populist parties all over Europe are examples of this phenomenon. People do not trust the traditional political elites anymore, and they reject institutions, for instance the European Union, which they perceive as bureaucratic, impenetrable Leviathans, run by and in the interests of technocrats and lawyers. A large number of critical scholars, using a broadly Foucauldian perspective, argue that the current crisis of liberalism and of Western representative democracies can be traced back to the foundations of liberalism itself. The points they emphasize are manifold and diverse, but it is striking that almost all contain one element in common: when reading their papers, Jeremy Bentham features prominently in the list of thinkers whose ideas are responsible for the current crisis.

Although Bentham clearly endorsed democratic principles, as demonstrated by Bentham scholars over several decades, his obsession with law, the critical scholars argue, has facilitated the de-politicization of politics which we see around us. Moreover, so the critique goes, in his writings security always triumphed over liberty, so that countless political attempts at balancing or reconciling liberty with security were necessarily doomed to fail, failures which simply stored up the serious unresolved socio-political problems for so-called liberal societies which are now coming home to roost.

In the planned book I will challenge this view. I will argue that Bentham, thanks to the principle of utility, to his conviction that the world can be only understood and reformed by language (i.e. communicative discourse), and to his method of calculation, would assert the central importance and necessity of an unshakable nexus between law making and politics, between liberty and security. I will demonstrate that Bentham’s utilitarianism can be reconstructed as what Jeremy Waldron calls “political political theory” – a political theory that takes political ideals as much into account as the institutions and processes through which those ideals are pursued, that is “a theory addressing itself to politics”. In this respect, I will show that Jeremy Bentham’s political theory can be read as a political theory of public policy which can help to shed new light on the problems we currently face, in political theory as well as in practical politics, and which offers a route towards renewal of the relationship between political theory and (re-politicized) politics.

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