GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

SOVEREIGNTY AND NATURAL RIGHTS 517
.amount of happiness. Increase of legislation means increase
of administrative machinery, and Bentham was accordingly
led to envisage the creation of an extensive Civil
Service. Although he was prepared to endow the Civil
Service with great and growing powers both administrative
and executive, he never lost sight of the importance of
subjecting the exercise of these powers to the control of the
sovereign people. Bentham went continuously in fear of
the dangers of bureaucracy: he knew how audacious
elected and appointed persons are apt to become, and he
accordingly devised a series of safeguards to provide for
the control of the officers of the State by the sovereign
people. Among these was a provision that any public
functionary could be dismissed by direct petition of the
people to Parliament, and a proposal for the appointment
of the Minister of Justice by the electorate and riot by
Parliament. By these and similar devices Bentham hoped
to secure the constant control and supervision by the
sovereign body of its delegates and executives.
Latent Contradiction in Beatham's Theory of Sov-
I have outlined Bentham J
s proposals in some
ereignty.
little detail because they provide a good example of the
logical working out of the implications of an extreme
democratic theory of Sovereignty. There are, nevertheless,
indications of another strain in Bentham's thought. Normally,
as we have seen, he regarded Sovereignty in a
community as being vested in the majority of its members.
What ought to be done in a community could, he held,
be discovered by the simple process of counting heads
and in the ideal community the press, the church and
the government could be regarded as the channels through
which the will of the majority expressed itself. Occasionally,
however, Bentham raises a question whose importance,
familiar to-day, must have been less obvious a century ago,
"
the question, namely, Who is it who forms public opinion,
who, in fact, controls the mob? " The answer, as we can now
see, is,
" Those who command the avenues through which