Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:15:56.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Jeremy Bentham on the Relief of Indigence: An Exercise in Applied Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Michael Quinn
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper will attempt to provide an overview of Bentham's fundamental thinking with regard to the relief of indigence. The manuscripts on which it draws form the texts of unpublished works, namely a set of ‘Three Essays on the Poor Laws’, which were completed by Bentham, and ‘Pauper Systems Compared’, which remains in a comparatively unfinished state. In the ‘Essays’, Bentham considers first the question of whether the relief of indigence should be a public responsibility, and, having concluded that it should, moves on to consider what conditions should be attached to that relief. In ‘Systems Compared’, Bentham analyzes different systems of provision in terms of their compatibility with these conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 81 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 It is undoubtedly true that when Bentham engages with detail in the plan of his pauper panopticon he displays an almost fanatical enthusiasm for deriving value from every scrap of labour, and for the most obsessional cheese-paring. He is also quite explicit about the origins of the profit margin of the National Charity Company; they are to be derived from the systematic exploitation of child labour. Without discussing these issues at length, one observation might be made. The reinstatement of the link between labour and subsistence with regard to the indigent lies at the core of Bentham's philosophical position with regard to poor relief. The conditions of relief are intended to facilitate the employment of labour which, for myriad reasons, is unemployed, or which cannot generate sufficient income, though employed, to maintain itself. The creation of the circumstances in which that labour can be employed requires the collection, organisation and detention ofthat labour. It requires a national, sophisticated structure, a supplement to the open labour market, precisely because that labour market issues, so far as the indigent are concerned, in their exposure to starvation. Any such structure will be expensive, potentially ruinously so. It is certainly Bentham's contention in 1797 that government administration of his scheme would indeed be inefficient and wasteful, yet the private management of indigence is not essential to Bentham's poor law proposals.

As L. J. Hume pointed out, in his Bentham and Bureaucracy, Cambridge, 1981, Bentham viewed contract management as appropriate for many concerns in comparison with the inefficiency of government administration, as it existed. However, Bentham did foresee the situation in which government should assume control over the administration of Industry Houses. For the present, having opted for contract management, it behoves Bentham to establish that such a concern can be run at a profit, and his efforts to establish just that constitute perhaps the major theme of the published Outline of a work entitled Pauper Management Improved (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838–1843, viii, 369–439Google Scholar). Economy as the object of justice may imply that the system of Industry Houses should break even, in the sense that the indigent should meet the cost of their own relief, as far as possible. Economy as the means to profit is implied by the assumption that only private management can erect and administer a structure complex enough to minister to the needs of indigence without injustice to the self-maintaining, since private management requires the incentive of profit.

2 See Townsend, J., A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, London, 1971Google Scholar; Eden, F. M., The State of the Poor: or an History of the Labouring Classes in England, London, 1797Google Scholar; for Bentham's views on Pitt's bill see Observations on the Poor Bill, introduced by the Right Honourable William Pitt, (Bowring, , viii. 440–61).Google Scholar

3 Townsend, J., p. 68–9.Google Scholar

4 UC cliiia. 1.Google Scholar

5 UC cliiia. 107.Google Scholar

6 UC cliiia. 5.Google Scholar

7 UC cliia. 55.Google Scholar

8 UC cliiia. 55.Google Scholar

9 The Theory of Legislation, ed. Ogden, C. K., London, 1931, p. 132.Google Scholar

10 UC cliia. 17.Google Scholar

11 Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Goldworth, A., Oxford, 1983 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 194.Google Scholar

12 UC cliia. 19.Google Scholar

13 UC cliia. 20.Google Scholar

14 UC cliia. 23.Google Scholar

15 See the review of Bahmueller, C. F., The National Charity Company: Jeremy Beniham's Silent Revolution, London, 1981Google Scholar, by Poynter, J. R. in The Bentham Newsletter, vi (1982), 35–40.Google Scholar Poynter, 's Society and Pauperism, London, 1969CrossRefGoogle Scholar, contains by far the best available analysis of Bentham's thinking on poor relief.

16 UC cliib. 492.Google Scholar

17 UC cliiia. 58.Google Scholar

18 UC cliiia. 60.Google Scholar

19 UC cliia. 225.Google Scholar

20 UC cliib. 534.Google Scholar

21 UC cliib. 493.Google Scholar

22 Ibid.

23 UC cliib. 536.Google Scholar

24 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., London, 1970 (Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 120n.Google Scholar

25 UC cliib. 493.Google Scholar

26 Bahmueller, C., The National Charity Company: Jeremy Bentham's Silent Revolution, London, 1981, pp. 156–69.Google Scholar

27 UC cliib. 488.Google Scholar

28 Semple, J., Bentham's Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary, Oxford, 1993, p. 153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 UC cliia. 232.Google Scholar

30 UC cliib. 487.Google Scholar

31 IPML, p. 66.Google Scholar

32 See Bahmueller, and also Himmelfarb, G., ‘Bentham's Utopia: The National Charity Company’, Journal of British Studies, x (1970), 99–107.Google Scholar

33 UC cliiia. 132, 132–3.Google Scholar

34 Burns, J. H., ‘Nature and Natural Authority in Bentham’, Utilitas v (1993), 209–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 UC cliiia. 95.Google Scholar

36 Roberts, W., ‘Bentham's Poor Law Proposals’, The Bentham Newsletter iii (1979), 42.Google Scholar