•  15
    Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics
    History of European Ideas 43 (1): 70-82. 2017.
    SUMMARYThe debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and…Read more
  •  1
    Facts, values, and 'real'numbers
    with Sophia Mihic and Elizabeth Rose Wingrove
  •  67
    Imagining Interest
    Utilitas 13 (3): 289. 2001.
    Bentham, a founder of political science based on the calculation of interest, has been misread as a crass materialist. I argue, instead, that Bentham's interest is a specific product of the imagination, and the pleasures and pains of which it is composed are also products of the imagination. On my reading, interests and imaginations are always governed and the role of Bentham's political science is to help govern them more effectively and efficiently. Political science is a mode of what he calls…Read more
  •  128
    Social science against democracy
    History of the Human Sciences 24 (5): 167-179. 2011.
  • Selected Writings (edited book)
    Yale University Press. 2011.
    Jeremy Bentham, philosopher and reformer, is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age. This introduction to his writings presents a representative selection of texts authoritatively restored by the Bentham Project, University College London. As well as more familiar pieces on utility, law, and politics/policy, highlights include the succinct essay “On Retrenchment” and a never-before-published treatise on sex. The volume is completed by major interpretative essays by Mark Canuel, D…Read more