Jeremy Bentham: his life and work

Jeremy Bentham: His Life And Work - is a book, which was first published in 1905 and written by Charles Milner Atkinson. Jeremy Bentham was an English moral philosopher and jurist, sociologist, lawyer, one of the largest theorists of political liberalism, the founder of one of the trends in English philosophy - utilitarianism. Sir John Bowring's valuable but incomplete edition of Bentham's works contains about five thousand five hundred pages printed in large type in two columns. The disparate memoirs, collected in the tenth and eleventh volumes, occupy, in addition, almost eight hundred pages. As a result of a series of reforms, some treatises have lost their original interest, while others are written in the intricate and complex style characteristic of Bentham in the last years of his life. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the volumes Bowring painstakingly compiled are rarely removed from the shelves of our public libraries. Nevertheless, most of the collection is of deep and enduring interest, and countless passages are scattered in each volume, which admirers of Bentham's genius would not want to sink into oblivion. This sketch of his life and work has been published in the hope that it may encourage some readers to become more familiar with his writings. The sources to which the author is indebted for the materials of this book are cited in the footnotes. In the case of some brief quotations from Bowring's memoirs, it was not deemed necessary to provide an exact reference.