The present work confines itself to the examination and exposure of only one class of fallacies: those relating to the adoption or rejection of some measure of government, whether of legislation or of administration. The latter pair are so intimately connected that for our purposes they need not be distinguished from one another.
Under the name of a Treatise on Political Fallacies this work will possess the character and effect of a manual on the art of government, having for its practical object and tendency the introduction of such features of good government as remain to be introduced, and their perpetuation by means of that instrument, reason, which alone will be productive of any useful effect.
Now there are two ways in which the instrument of reason can be employed in this endeavor. The first and more direct is by showing positively, with respect to each measure proposed, in what ways and with what consequences it is likely to accomplish the end which it professes to have in view. The second and less direct is by pointing out the irrelevancy, and thus anticipating and destroying the persuasive force of such deceptious arguments as are likely to be used in dissuading men from supporting it.
Of these two different but harmonizing modes of applying this same instrument of reason to its several purposes, the more direct is that of which a sample has been before the public since 1802 in the collection of unfinished papers of legislation published at Paris in French by M. Dumont, but for whose labors it would scarcely, in the author's life-time at least, have seen the light. To exhibit the less direct, but in its application the more extensive use, is the business of the present work.
To give existence to good arguments was the object of the former work; to provide for the exposure of bad ones is the object of the present one—to provide for the exposure of their real nature, and hence for the destruction of their pernicious force. Sophistry is a hydra of which, if all the necks could be exposed, the force would be destroyed. In this work they have been diligently looked out for, and in the course of it the principal and most active of them have been brought in view.
(Jeremy Bentham, Bentham's Handbook of Political Fallacies, ed. Harold A. Larrabee [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1952; Apollo ed., 1971], 6-7 [book first published as The Book of Fallacies in 1824] [footnote omitted])
