CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

The Joys of Jeremy Bentham 311
Jeremy Bentham will forever be linked in spirit and, literally, in body to
University College London (UCL). When he died in 1832 at age 84, earlier
arrangements he had suggested for the disposition of his body were carried
out. With friends in attendance his corpse was dissected. Then his head was
shrunken. Then his skeleton was attired in gentlemanly clothes and seated in
a glass case. The head appeared too small, so it was placed on the floor of the
case and a wax head was affixed, looking rather like Benjamin Franklin. This
Auto-Icon was moved to UCL in 1850, where its presence is still recorded at
meetings of the College Council. Bentham is noted to be present but not
voting, except in instances of ties among council members, when his vote is
invariably “for” whatever motion hangs in the balance. Because Bentham’s
own head, disfigured as it was, became far too tempting an object for students
from rival colleges, it was finally removed from the Auto-Icon case and
stored in UCL’s vaults.
An early biographer, Charles Milner Atkinson, found that Bentham’s
confidence in his simple doctrine was overbearing: “Armed with this principle
of ‘utility’ . . . he deemed himself fully equipped to encounter any difficulty,
to remove any obstacle that should present itself in the wide range of
morals, politics or law . . .” 25
Bentham’s philosophy shriveled the influence of Adam Smith’s Theory of
Moral Sentiments. Instead, capitalism became linked with the emergent English
attachment to utilitarianism and its founding notions of ends, means,
maximizing, calculated good, and expediency. The linkage would last to the
present day, contributing simultaneously to a greater sum of advantages,
that is, global wealth, and to a staggering separation between rich and poor,
consistent with the ideas of selective sacrifice and ends exonerating means.
To put it simply, Smith’s capitalism was hijacked by Bentham’s utilitarianism.
Eighteenth-century Bentham might be pleased with the outcome, but
twenty-first-century capitalists should be deeply concerned.