Bentham and bureaucracy

This work is an essay in the history of ideas, the report of an inquiry into the sources and evolution of Jeremy Bentham's ideas about the functions, structure and activities of government. Its starting point is the programme for the organization of govern ment that Bentham set out in his Constitutional Code, which was the last and in a sense the culminating major product of his many years' work on jurisprudence and codification.¹

The Constitutional Code is in some respects a repellent work. Its arrangement is obscure and its language is obsolete and con torted. It represents, nevertheless, a remarkable achievement.² It far surpasses in comprehensiveness and in attention to detail the many Constitutions that were drafted during Bentham's own lifetime, in North and South America, in France, in Norway, in Spain, in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe.

In particular, the five chapters relating to the Executive display these qualities and other important ones as well. They are much more extensive and go into much more detail than the material that Bentham's contemporaries provided for this branch of government: their 250 pages of double-column print contrast strikingly with, for example, the couple of score Articles in the French Constitution of 1791, the 4 Sections in the Constitution of the United States of 1789, the 33 Articles in the Greek Constitu tion of 1822 or even the 100 Articles in the Spanish Constitution of 1812. And Bentham's chapters possess a theoretical consistency and sophistication and a prescience that are quite unusual among constitutional draftsmen at any time or in any place.