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Jeremy Bentham Biography

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About 13 pages (3,836 words)
Jeremy Bentham Summary

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Name: Jeremy Bentham
Birth Date: February 15, 1748
Death Date: June 6, 1832
Place of Birth: Houndsditch, England
Place of Death: England
Nationality: English
Gender: Male
Occupations: philosopher, jurist, political theorist

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of English utilitarianism, the doctrine of using the criterion of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" to determine the moral value of any given action. Bentham employed utilitarian philosophy to examine governments, law, education, social policies, and individual behavior. Many of Bentham's writings were unpublished in his lifetime, but his "principle of utility," which he later renamed the "greatest happiness principle," was expounded throughout the nineteenth century by Bentham disciples, the Philosophical Radicals, who were to have important roles in the political and administrative reform of Victorian England. The ambitious scope of Bentham's projects, which included an attempt to codify the vast and mazelike constitutional and common law of England, and his confusing prose style made his work inaccessible to many of his peers, causing Edward Bulwer-Lytton to comment: "He acted upon the destinies of his race, by influencing the thoughts of the minute fraction who think" (England and the English, 1833).

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    The English philosopher, political theorist, and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) expounded the et... more

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    Copyrights
    Natalie Bell Cole, Oakland University. Jeremy Bentham from Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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