Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was educated at Westminster and Queen’s College, Oxford. He was called to the bar but found the work morally and intellectually distasteful and set out to theorize a simple and equitable legal system. The law of utility, for which he is best remembered, states that the goodness of a law can be measured in accordance with the means in which it subserves the happiness of the individual. His democratic views are expressed in his Constitutional Code (1830). With J. S. Mill he founded the Westminster Review, the organ of the philosophical radicals. True to his principles, Bentham left his body to be dissected and his skeleton is on view at University College London.