INTRODUCTION

Since Bentham is the guiding spirit of the present book, it is appropriate to devote a chapter to the exposition and discussion of his views on institutional design.

I shall mainly rely on two bodies of his writings. The first consists of Political Tactics and other texts written around the time of the French Revolution and formulated in part as advice about how to organize the Estates-General. Political Tactics is an especially important text. It “seems to be the first attempt ever made to theorize broadly about parliamentary procedures.” In his introduction to the 1816 edition of that work, the editor Etienne Dumont also affirmed that “The internal rules of a political assembly is a branch of legislation, and even an essential branch. Until now, no political writer has discussed them explicitly.”

The second body of texts, written from 1820 onward, proposes and justifies a constitutional code, by which Bentham simply meant a legislative code. (As I explain below, he was opposed to constitutions that fetter majority rule.) At that time, he also made detailed proposals for a constitutional code for Libya (Tripoli). Over these thirty years, Bentham’s political views changed radically, and in a radical direction. He discarded, for instance, his earlier proposal of economic qualifications on voters. As my main task is to bring out the intrinsic interest of the causal mechanisms that Bentham proposed at various times, I shall not attempt to trace the evolution of his thought in any detail. I am self-consciously and unapologetically engaging in cherry-picking, not in intellectual history.