Recently, instead of the estimate of ‘some 70,000 pages’ offered by Michael Quinn in his Bentham (p. 6), Professor Philip Schofield, the current General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, has estimated that Bentham's surviving manuscripts consist of around 100,000 pages, containing 30 million words, and would fill up more than eighty volumes (Schofield, The Forum on the BBC World Service, 27 January 2022). Bentham's output is really remarkable, and appears almost superhuman. Even the eleven huge volumes of the Bowring edition of The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1838–43) would daunt many established and aspiring scholars. From J. S. Mill's Bentham (1838) and John Hill Burton's Introduction to the Study of the Works of Jeremy Bentham (in Bentham, 1838–43, vol. i, pp. 5–83) onwards, there have been quite a number of Benthams, as presented by Leslie Stephen (1900), Élie Halévy (1928), C. M. Atkinson (1905), C. W. Everitt (1932), Mary P. Mack (1963), James Steintrager (1977), Ross Harrison (1983) and John Dinwiddy (1989), but all their Benthams are either trees without roots, or trees without proper roots. Failing to perceive the metaphysical basis for Bentham's philosophy, and thus remaining unaware of his foundational principles, J. S. Mill completely distorted Bentham's thought, leaving a disastrous and far-reaching legacy which still reverberates today. The most recent presentation, Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), by Philip Schofield, supplements his previous masterpiece, Utility and Democracy (2006). However, for beginners, Utility and Democracy seems very likely to cover up and obscure the most essential Bentham with its multitude of direct quotes from Bentham's manuscripts.

Michael Quinn's Bentham is just the book that I have long desired. The writing is penetrating, concise, compact and elegant, hence very readable. I feel as if Quinn has tried to use up all his energy to offer as good and as faithful a Bentham as possible. In consequence, this book suits laymen as well as advanced scholars.

Quinn seems to have a very clear reader-oriented strategy. He is not simply showing us what Bentham said. Keeping the difficult questions from his years of teaching Bentham in mind, Quinn has carefully selected and presented the important opposing interpretations to reconstruct the labyrinth in which the readers are likely to get lost, and then, by penetrating analysis, brought out the deeper ground for Bentham's assertions, and highlighted the often-obscured core issues, helping readers to find the right way out by themselves as their confusions are reduced.

This book reconstructs the most essential and profoundest Bentham. There are two keys to a sensible understanding of Bentham. The first key is Bentham's metaphysics, especially his ontology, epistemology and psychology. The second key is the measurement of pleasure and pain. The first chapter of Quinn's Bentham, ‘Life and Logic’, is followed by the second chapter comprising ‘1. Psychology’, ‘2. Morality’, ‘3. Competing Principles’, ‘4. Measuring Pleasures and Pains’. The two keys mentioned above are the germ of Bentham's thought. When analysing the most puzzling and disputed issues, Quinn is always able to exhibit the underlying principle. For example, when comparing Bentham's metaphysical real entity approach with Smith's appeal to commonsensical metaphor, Quinn states that: ‘He (Bentham) didn't underrate imagination, reflective decision-making depended on choosing apt analogies’ (p. 106). If you bear in mind that J. S. Mill once accused Bentham of a lack of imagination, then you will certainly feel Quinn's penetrating power. Regrettably, Bentham has been repeatedly viewed by great minds such as J. S. Mill, C. S. Peirce, Schumpeter and Marx as variously a ‘vulgar utilitarian’, a ‘shallow logician’, or an ‘insipid pedantic leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence’.

Bentham is an encyclopaedic thinker; his writing is broad and fecund. But somehow, Quinn has succeeded in crafting a relatively complete Bentham, which progresses as follows: ‘Life and Logic’ (chapter 1), ‘The Principle of Utility’ (chapter 2), ‘Direct Legislation’ (chapter 3), ‘Indirect Legislation’ (chapter 4), ‘Civil Law and Political Economy’ (chapter 5), ‘Principals, Agents and Institutional Design’ (chapters 6, 7), ‘International Law’ (chapter 8), ‘Jeremy Bentham: Why Bother?’ (chapter 9). As to other important topics such as private ethics, procedure, religion and fallacies, and Bentham's detailed critiques of natural right, Quinn addresses them briefly but in an enlightening way.

An even more concise and essential Bentham can be found by reading only the conclusions of each chapter. Once readers have finished the whole book, they would be well served by returning to Quinn's powerful introduction. Whether one reads the entire book or not, rereading Quinn's introduction is advised. An exceptional feature of the book is the chapter on international law. This chapter not only underscores Bentham's cosmopolitanism, but also challenges the notion that Bentham is a consistently anti-colonial writer. It is more than the icing on the cake.

Quinn's knowledge of Bentham's political economy makes his comparison between Bentham and Smith especially appealing. For instance, Quinn writes: ‘If Smith's political economy succeeded by making art look like science and keeping the discursive machinery out of sight behind the curtain, Bentham's ostensible aim was to draw back the curtain and allow spectators to evaluate the effectiveness of the machinery’ (p. 106).

But Quinn is at his best where he takes up Bentham philosophically, as especially exemplified in two points. The first one and, in my eyes, the most stunning, is Quinn's masterly encapsulation of ‘both subjective and objective elements’ in Bentham's epistemology and ontology, and consequently his concise but very lucid reconstruction of Bentham's inter-subjective communication. Quinn asserts that ‘all human experience is subjective: we live our lives from the inside out, having no direct access to each other's experience. Each of us inhabits a private reality’ (p. 18). ‘Although all experience is subjective, successful communication’ is quite possible, given that Bentham presupposed the existence of what he terms ‘universal cognitive competence’ (p. 21). As Quinn goes on to state:

Otherwise, a purely subjectivist interpretation, as held by Gerald J. Postema, would not accommodate Bentham's ontology of real and fictitious entities, or an objective materialist interpretation, as held by Philip Schofield, would ‘disqualify from real entity status all the psychical real entities, including the sensations of pleasure and pain’ (pp. 20–24, 182). This is truly a splendid insight, and I am inclined to believe that this interpretation must be the most sympathetic one with the authentic Bentham. Quinn thus brings out Bentham as a stunningly profound metaphysician.

The second point lies in Quinn's referencing figures ranging from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Peirce to Foucault, Rawls, Nozick and Dworkin. For example, he writes:

One statement from Quinn must be highlighted: ‘This book is not an attempt to defend Bentham against his many critics, historical or contemporary. It will argue that there are unresolved tensions in his thought’ (p. 2). This is the most extraordinary feature of this book, and the most valuable part. Quinn has in fact intentionally left many superficial but influential criticisms aside, instead concentrating more on ‘unresolved tensions’ in Bentham's thinking such as realism versus pragmatism in logic, self-preference versus general benevolence, rationalism versus constructivism in political economy, universalist human versus state citizen. Quinn resolves most of these quite effectively. For example, he writes:

I do not want to give the impression that Quinn's study lacks shortcomings. I would like to point out three. First, as to the tension between self-preference and general benevolence, Bentham himself has already provided his resolution. This can be partly found in his Constitutional Code, where he noted:

Second, as to Bentham's ontology, Quinn's approach of universalized inter-subjectivity still falls short of accommodating the entire ontology, especially accommodating the foundational essential subjective element. As to the hotly disputed matter of fictitious entities, Bentham himself once clearly asserted that fictitious entities must have some real source or connecting principle (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. viii, p. 246). As to real entities, Bentham distinguished them into two groups: first, immediate real entities, i.e. states of mind; and second, inferential real entities, i.e. external bodies. As to the existence of immediate real entities, ‘the persuasion is produced by sense without reasoning’, while for the existence of inferential real entities, ‘the persuasion, in as far as it has place, is produced by reason, by reflection’ (UC cii. 13, 26 September 1814). Bentham went on to state that: ‘Under the head of perceptible real entities may be placed without difficulty individual perceptions of all sorts: the impressions … the ideas … the new ideas produced by the action of the imagination, by the decomposition and recomposition of those groupes’ (UC cii. 13, 26 September 1814).

Yes, a golden mountain is a fabulous entity, i.e. a non-entity, because it cannot be verified by experiences, but the idea of a golden mountain itself, derived either from illusion, misjudgement, or purely from imagination, is, like the perception of pain or pleasure, a state of mind, and thus, of course, is an immediate real entity. In other words, although a golden mountain does not exist as an inferential real entity, the idea of a golden mountain does exist as an immediate real entity. So, the idea of a golden mountain is idiosyncratic, and can hardly be universalized, or in Bentham's words is to be regarded as ‘unconjecturable’. This is why Bentham took the religious sanction as one of the four sanctions alongside the physical, political and moral sanctions, because religious people really thought such things as God, devils and angels really existed, although Bentham thought they were actually non-entities (Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, 1977, pp. 34–37; 1838–43, vol. viii, pp. 195–96; 1983, p. 100). And this is also why Bentham never denied the faculty of imagination, and enthusiastically embraced and encouraged all sorts of arts and sciences (Bentham, 1983, pp. 89–90; 1838–43, vol. ii, pp. 213, 254, 259), instead of being the crude enemy of poetry castigated by J. S. Mill.

Indeed, Bentham had delivered the message that all poetry was misrepresentation, claiming that ‘between poetry and truth there is a natural opposition’: ‘Truth, exactitude of every kind, is fatal to poetry. The poet must see everything through coloured media, and strive to make everyone else to do the same’ (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. ii, pp. 253–4). But he simply meant that poetry was quite idiosyncratic; in other words it possessed a very low degree of universality, and did not completely correspond to inferential real entities, external bodies, with a high degree of universality. Therefore, in the public sphere, if you want to be a right reasoner, especially as a legislator or a moralist, you have to base yourself completely on real entities rather than fabulous non-entities (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. ii, pp. 511, 513), otherwise you will be a practitioner of the adversary principle of sympathy and antipathy rather than the principle of utility.

I would like to say that, for Bentham's staunch and loyal empiricism, an inter-subjective approach seems too flamboyant and would very probably fall into the category of common sense, which he castigated as ipse dixitism. I would also like to go further and assert that Bentham's approach is an individualist subjective approach, rather than an inter-subjective approach. Perception is completely subjective, so fundamentally a person cannot perfectly get to know other people's perceptions. As to other people's perceptions, we can only get an understanding via ‘conjecture’, as expounded in Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence (especially intensively discussed at 1838–43, vol. vii, pp. 206–7). Bentham went further to associate conjecture with rationality, and unconjecturability with irrationality (ibid.).

Very naturally and indeed necessarily, Bentham held that individuals are the best judges of their own pains and pleasures, and hence of their own interests (Bentham, 1996, pp. 189, 289–91): ‘No man can be so good a judge as the man himself, what it is gives him pleasure or displeasure’ (Bentham, 1996, p. 159). This prompted Bentham to class all sorts of pains and pleasures into two groups: self-regarding and extra-regarding, with the intention of maintaining his individualist approach (Bentham, 1996, p. 49).

Of course, conjecture will necessarily be susceptible of mistakes, and thus will give rise to misunderstandings. But, in reality, communication between people still works, because an adequate degree of understanding can be established and demonstrated. None of the above would be possible without a universal human nature. Reflection and taking as many circumstances as possible into consideration will improve understanding. So, in Bentham's eyes, perfect understanding and truth were beyond reach, but people could nevertheless approach both primarily via individual reflection (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. viii, p. 196).

In short, the individualist approach can offer a much better account for almost every aspect of Bentham's utilitarianism, including issues of truth and meaning, in the private sphere as well as the public sphere. This approach seems to fit much better with the metaphysics of the authentic Bentham. Bentham's metaphysics is an extremely sophisticated jigsaw of empiricism, reductionism, belief, convention, prejudice, interest and realism. In light of Humean epistemology, C. S. Peirce's pragmatism and postmodern epistemology, Bentham's metaphysics seems to be much more sophisticated and consistent. Bentham, I have to say, is a truly superb philosopher who was ahead of his time by over a century and whose thought will most likely still be raising questions for the year 2032, as Ogden observed in 1932.

Third, Bentham's thought belongs to ‘science’ as well as ‘art’. Quinn insists that Bentham's focus was always practical ‘art’ rather than ‘science’ (pp. 15, 107). And this is also where Quinn comes up short. In my eyes, metaphysics had never been a minor concern of Bentham, and he always strove to explore and develop it. This can be demonstrated in Preparatory Principles and Bentham's writings on logic. Preparatory Principles, based on over 600 pages of manuscript, was first published in 2016, but was written by Bentham in the early 1770s, before his earliest published authored work A Fragment on Government (1776). Preparatory Principles, according to its editors, is ‘a philosophical commonplace book in which Bentham attempted to work out the foundational ideas for his new science of legislation … a storehouse of ideas … [that] had a profound and enduring value’ (Bentham, 2016, pp. xi–xii).

The above judgment is supported by Bentham's On Logic, comprising twenty-one chapters including ‘Operations’, ‘Faculties’, ‘Ontology’, ‘Methodization’, ‘Discourse’, ‘Paraphrasis’, ‘Ideas’, ‘Invention’ and ‘Universal Grammar’, etc. The volume of On Logic has about 400 pages, although a large part of the original manuscripts has been lost. But these manuscripts were written by Bentham between 1814 and 1816, forty years after the publication of A Fragment on Government (1776).

The above judgment can also be directly and sufficiently proven by Bentham's own words. On several occasions, Bentham held that: ‘Every science, then, has it's Metaphysics’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 197); ‘Natural Philosophy has it's metaphysics. Medicine has it's metaphysics. Grammar has it's metaphysics … legislation, as much as any, has it's metaphysics; and in the improvement of this, as of those, experience and metaphysics must go hand in hand’ (Bentham, 2016, pp. 265–66); Locke was acknowledged as ‘in a manner the inventor’ of ‘modern Metaphysics, genuine Metaphysics’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 265); Metaphysics was the way to obtain ‘good Souls’, but unfortunately remained ‘yet untrodden’. Hume was the only exception, ‘censurable not for having enter'd into Metaphysics, but for having lost his way’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 197).

Bentham asserted that ‘They who hate Metaphysics, hate the only principles by which alone any controverted points in Law can be clearly solved. When reason is against a man, a man will be against reason’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 265). As to Burke's emphatic statement that ‘I hate metaphysics’, in Preparatory Principles and the writings on logic alone, Bentham expressed strong disapproval on at least seven occasions, including ‘I hate Metaphysics, said Burke. So Cacus hated day-light’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 165). He also once particularly denounced Blackstone's complete failure in metaphysics (Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, 1977, p. 348).

So far so obvious that, in Bentham's eyes, it was extremely necessary and urgent to explore metaphysics. Given that in ‘The field of Ontology … the field of supremely abstract entities is a yet untrodden labyrinth, – a wilderness never hitherto explored’ (Bentham, 1838–43: vol. viii, p. 195), Bentham himself bravely undertook the great task of the exploration and elaboration of ontology.

Bentham asserted that: ‘metaphysics … is that science which teacheth the signification of words, and [the] origination of the ideas which they signify’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 265); and that ‘every Science has it’s leading terms … men are apt to suppose that they are thoroughly understood, but which very often, when examined into, turn out to be very far from thoroughly understood’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 196). Taking his metaphysics as belonging to the modern and genuine type, Bentham distinguished his metaphysics from false and old metaphysics which followed Aristotle's method of per genus et differentiam. Bentham asserted that: ‘In defining many a moral or metaphysical term’, men of those false and old metaphysics ‘have met’ ‘ill success’ (Bentham, 2016, pp. 97–98).

Bentham further stated that: ‘Metaphysics is descended of creditable parents, Experience and Reflection’ (Bentham, 2016, p. 329). In my eyes, this statement embodies the core of Bentham's metaphysics. Very probably, it is the only satisfactory viable solution ever to Hume's Problem. In ‘Experience’, Bentham is more than a loyal follower of Locke and Hume, for he went on to expose their failures in sticking completely to ‘Experience’. As to Locke, he asserted that ‘Locke, to whom mankind owe a debt, … The subject-many had not got within his sphere of observation’ (Bentham, 1983, p. 289). As to Hume, he asserted that Hume's ‘Moral Sense’ was a ‘vague idea’, ‘a fiction of ipse dixitism’ and ‘the Genius of Nonsense’, and thus made him oscillate between the principle of utility and the Ipse dixit principle (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. vi, p. 240; 1983, pp. 27, 55, 57, 285, 286, 289, 290, 292, 314, 319).

But by no means was Bentham unaware of Hume's scepticism from ‘Experience’, and his extra mechanism of ‘Reflection’ facilitated a utilitarian pragmatic resolution to the scepticism. Bentham stated: ‘Suppose the non-existence … of any hard corporeal substance that stands opposite to you, make this supposition, and as soon as you have made it, act upon it, pain, the perception of pain, will at once bear witness against you’ (Bentham, 1838–43, vol. viii, p. 197). Compared with the version of pragmatism developed a century later by C. S. Peirce, Bentham's pragmatism is a much superior one in terms of truth and meaning, a version free of transcendental magic.

Finally, I would say that without a successful and thorough exploration of metaphysics, for Bentham, such a universally applauded achievement in the massive practical field is hardly possible. If Quinn had adopted this attitude, thus giving up the opinion also held by Gerald J. Postema that Bentham only wanted to develop a fairly minimal and stripped-down epistemology, just in order to get on with applying it to practical problems (Postema, 2019, pp. 285–86), and gone on to compare Bentham's metaphysics with the metaphysics of those major philosophers such as C. S. Peirce, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer and Derrida, he might have delivered a much more authentic and profounder Bentham.

This book is the fruit of many years of wholehearted, devoted study by a master, philosophically astute, editor of Bentham's manuscripts. His experience in editing Bentham's manuscripts is second only to that of the current General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and this also underlines his qualifications for writing Bentham. As he says, ‘putting a Bentham volume together requires countless decisions’ (p. 7). This Bentham is so penetrating; it is a splendid crusade, and it is a significant exploration.