CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

CHAPTER 9
THE JOYS OF
JEREMY BENTHAM
IF ADAM SMITH is rolling over in his grave, Jeremy Bentham is overjoyed
because he has never been put into his grave. Not only his body
but also his philosophical notions outlasted those of his contemporaries.
Bentham offered to the world a seemingly seductive ethical formulation
that knocked Smith out of contention and inhibited developments
in other schools of moral philosophy for the next 175 years. He may
have had some engaging, even if inoperable, ideas in the eighteenth century,
but his ramblings far outlived their usefulness by the twenty-first
century.
Bentham was born in London in 1748, 25 years after Smith had entered
the world. Whereas Smith was kidnapped while playing at age three, Bentham
was found sitting at a desk reading history at age three. His father, a
successful lawyer, introduced his child prodigy to Latin the same year and by
age five he was playing Handel on the violin and by age eight learning
French. A small, weak, and nervous child constantly pushed toward great
achievements, Bentham later lamented the lack of familial feeling in his relationship
with his father. Growing up with no friends of his own age, it was
his mother to whom he turned for affection, and her passing when he was
11 was a severe blow.
Bentham matriculated to Queen’s College, Oxford, at 13, graduated at
16, and took a master’s degree at 18. He entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1763, an
institution by then already some 240 years old and now, going on 500
years, still one of the most prestigious of British societies preparing barristers
for careers in law. During the next decade he was admitted to the bar
300