The Bentham Edition
| Author | F. Rosen |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1996.tb00031.x |
| Published date | 01 May 1996 |
| Date | 01 May 1996 |
Politics
(1996) 16(2)
pp.
127-132
The
Bentham
Edition
F.
Rosen
Nearly
a
third
of
the 65-volume edition
of
The Collected
Works
of
Jeremy Bentham
has
now been completed How
has
it changed
our understanding
of
Bentham’s thought and
his
contribution to contempora
y
political
theory?
The new edition
of
The Collected Works
of
Jeremy Bentham,
now estimated at sixty-he
volumes (including fourteen volumes
of
Cor-
respondence), ranks
among the largest aca-
demic publishing projects in Europe
(Bentham, 196%).
For
approximately thirty
years scholars have been working quietly at
University College London and elsewhere to
produce the twenty volumes which have been
published and to prepare the ground for the
rest of the edition.’
For
those who are
acquainted with the state of the manuscripts,
the complex history of Bentham’s published
writings, the hopeless inadequacy of the
only
other edition
of
his
Works
(Bentham,
1838-
43)
available, and Bentham’s virtually indeci-
pherable hand,
the
fact that nearly a third of
the edition has been completed at
all
is
near
miraculous.
As
to
whether
or
not the edition
has been
worth
the great effort and expense
involved,
I
can
only
say
that
this
sort
of cost-
benefit analysis, much admired by Bentham
himself,
lies
beyond his editor’s capacity for
rational calculation. Nevertheless,
I
can sug-
gest that the new edition
will
change the map
of modern scholarshp in a number
of
fields,
and in doing
so
will
extend our knowledge
of
modern political theory far beyond
its
con-
temporary boundaries.
New perspectives
The Bentham edition is contributing not only
to
the way we read Bentham but also to how
we understand the tradtion of political and
social thought to which he belongs and
which
still
informs contemporaty discussions.
Following the publication of important
volumes of Bentham’s jurisprudence (Ben-
tham, 1970, 19771,
it
was
no longer possible
to use John Austin’s
Province
of
Jur-
isprudence Determined
as
a usehl abridge-
ment
of
Bentham’s thought.
As
H.L.A.
Hart
noted,
if
Of Laws in General
had appeared in
Bentham’s lifetime,
‘it,
rather than John
Aus-
tin’s later and obviously derivative work,
would have dominated English jurisprudence,
and
.
. .
analytical jurisprudence, not only in
England, would have advanced far more
rapidly and branched out in more
fertile
ways
than
it
has since Bentham’s days’(Hart, 1982,
p.
108).
What Hart did not add
is
that
with
his
own
writings
on
jurisprudence, analytlcal
jurisprudence has developed far more
fruit-
Fred
Rosen,University
College,
London.
0
Political Studies Association
1996.
Published
by
Blackwell Publishes,
108
Cowley Road,
Oxford
OX4
IJF,
UK
and
238
Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
127
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