A third view of Bentham as a kind of bête noire is one that has been not uncommon on the political Left. It was most famously expressed by Marx, who had a gift for rudeness but excelled himself in his description of Bentham in Das Kapital: 'the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century . . . a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.' One likely reason for Marx's severity was the fact (evident from his references) that he knew Bentham's work principally through Dumont's French editions, which presented the earlier and in many respects more conservative phase of his thought. It is also possible that Marx was influenced—as some later socialist interpreters have been—by the fact that after Bentham's death his ideas did come to form the basis, to a greater extent than he would probably have liked, of a distinctly middle-class ideology. In the 1830s 'philosophic' or Benthamite radicalism acquired a thrust that was much more anti-aristocratic than democratic or popular; it also came to be associated with the harsher aspects of political economy, and especially with the New Poor Law of 1834.
It is certainly true, however, that even in his radical phase Bentham's concern for the security of property meant that he remained by Marxist criteria essentially 'bourgeois'; and it is also true that his view of human nature was very different from Marx's. Although he did believe that with the progress of civilization there was a tendency for 'social' motives to be strengthened, he did not imagine that human psychology could ever be changed so radically that 'self-regarding' motives would cease to predominate. For Marx, the egoism and individualism which Bentham took for granted and built into his system were not permanent and universal features of human nature, but characteristics of man under capitalism. Marx had a vision of what human nature could, or rather would, be like—of how man as a 'species being' would achieve fulfilment in a communist society—which was much more optimistic than Bentham's; and Bentham, for all his radicalism, was in the last resort conservative from a Marxist standpoint because he accepted man more or less as he was (or as he thought he was).
(John Dinwiddy, Bentham, Past Masters, ed. Keith Thomas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 115-6 [ellipsis in original])
Note from KBJ: Karl Marx sounds like a wonderful human being, doesn't he? I love the final sentence of this passage. Jeremy Bentham, who despised conservatism (of every sort: legal, political, linguistic, moral, and so forth), turns out to be conservative "from a Marxist standpoint." But everyone is conservative from a Marxist standpoint, so what ice does that cut? Marx, like many of his modern-day sycophants, was quite nuts.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 