Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was a child prodigy who took his Oxford degree at fifteen, never practised the law he was trained in, and spent sixty years writing, mostly unpublished, the reform of everything: law, prisons, the poor law, the constitution, the language. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation of 1789 states the principle of utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the calculus of pleasures that Mill inherited and softened. He designed the Panopticon prison that Foucault made notorious, and left his body to be dissected and displayed; it sits in a cabinet at University College London.