Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer who founded modern utilitarianism and whose writings on legal codification, prison design, and political representation made him among the most-influential English political thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born on February 15, 1748, in Houndsditch, London, the son of an attorney, and was a precocious child who read scholarly Latin and Greek by age five and entered Queen's College, Oxford, at age 12.

He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1769 but never practiced, instead devoting himself to legal philosophy. His Fragment on Government (1776) attacked the legal commentator William Blackstone and his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) set out the principle that the rightness of an action is determined by the extent to which it tends to produce "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

He proposed the Panopticon, a circular prison design in which a single guard could observe all inmates without their knowing whether they were being watched. The British government considered building it for two decades but the project was eventually abandoned in 1813. He wrote in support of the abolition of slavery, the decriminalization of homosexual acts, women's suffrage, the separation of church and state, animal welfare, and the abolition of capital and corporal punishment — positions that placed him decades ahead of mainstream British political opinion.

He was a founding influence on the establishment of University College London in 1826 — the first English university to admit students regardless of religion or sex — and bequeathed his preserved body to the institution as an "auto-icon," where it remains on display in a glass case in the Student Centre. He died in London on June 6, 1832, at age 84.

His name Jeremy is the English form of the Hebrew Yirmeyahu, meaning "Yahweh will exalt" or "appointed by God," the name of the biblical prophet who wrote the Book of Lamentations. Jeremy was an uncommon English boys' name in the eighteenth century, more often used in the longer form Jeremiah.