A delightfully fetching photograph of the inn sign for the Jeremy Bentham Pub in Bloomsbury adorns this book, written by a Marie Curie Fellow at University College London – perhaps the first time that the picture has been used for a book cover? The volume is one of the most recent contributions to a very substantial literature on Bentham in the Italian language. This interest on the part of a people known for their superb accomplishments in music and the arts and architecture in a thinker so often dismissed as the acme of English prosaicness and unimaginativeness is intriguing.

Books about Bentham often start from the position that he needs defending, in part on account of the negative image referred to above, and this book is no exception. Curiously, however, the blurb tells us that Bentham is known ‘above all for the picturesque aspects of his life – the Panopticon and the bizarre will (his mummy is still conserved in a box)’. The blurb goes on to state that Pellegrino wishes to provide a ‘renewed vision’ in contradistinction to the alleged current view of Bentham as having a crudely egoistical conception of the human being combined with illiberal and anti-democratic views.

On the question of the ‘illiberal and anti-democratic’ Bentham, Pellegrino is in reality going with the flow of Bentham specialists, most (though perhaps not quite all) of whom long ago abandoned that particular Bentham. I argued in The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism that this reading of Bentham can largely be blamed on the huge global popularity of the abstracts of his manuscripts published by the Genevan Etienne Dumont and later rendered into English in the Theory of Legislation. This latter work created a ‘brand image’ of the English thinker which endured right down to the first decades after the Second World War – but it contained none of the radical writing of Bentham's later years. The readership for the Theory of Legislation far outnumbered that for Bowring's edition of the Collected Works, and so a legend was born.

Pellegrino's first chapter provides the classic discussion of the current status quo in a survey of tradition and revisionism in Bentham studies. The second chapter analyses in some detail Bentham's theory of motivation, and the author makes much of the distinction between psychological egoism and motivational hedonism. The third chapter considers the relationship between Bentham's utilitarianism and liberalism, with an extensive comparison of Benthamite and Humean versions of utilitarianism.

Having concluded that Bentham is far from being a prophet of illiberalism, Pellegrino adds a final chapter on Panopticon, which of course is often assumed to prove the opposite. He argues that Panopticon illustrates how Bentham's thinking advocates motivational hedonism as distinct from psychological egoism. Visibility and the fear of being seen are the fount of unpleasant sensations that motivate the inmate to behave in conformity with the desired rules. The objective of the supervisor is to create the unpleasant sensations in the supervisee that will motivate him to avoid certain actions.

It is to be welcomed that Pellegrino actively seeks to integrate Panopticon – an obsessive centre of Bentham's concern for many of his prime years – into Bentham's utilitarian system of thought rather than treating it as a kind of appendage to his thinking, or even ignoring it altogether, as other Bentham scholars have often done. And Pellegrino rightly questions whether the English reformer ever intended to promote Panopticism as a totalizing paradigm or ‘Big Brother’ model for the organization of the whole of society. Unfortunately he lists me as one of those who failed to ask this question in The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism, whereas in fact it represents an absolutely fundamental element in the argument of that book. I state uncompromisingly there that Bentham never intended Panopticon to be a model for the total organization of society. Pellegrino also neglects to mention the many ways in which modern society has happily canonized Bentham's thinking without acknowledgement – as for example with its immense veneration for the notions of transparency, accountability and economy on which Panopticon is based. This is unfortunate, not least because if he had done so, it would have strengthened his case against Bentham's being seen as ‘illiberal and anti-democratic’.

That said, Pellegrino's book makes a useful contribution to the ongoing discussions of utilitarianism which seem to give so much pleasure to philosophers. It is only a pity that the outpouring of work on Bentham and Benthamism by philosophers and legal historians does not seem to be matched by a similar output of monographs in intellectual history. A new Halévy is sorely needed if we are to do justice to the immense range of Bentham's interests and to escape from the straitjacket of somewhat jaded analytical categories.