Jeremy Bentham

Bentham was the son of a London attorney and a prodigy who read Latin at three, entered Oxford at twelve and graduated at fifteen. His father intended him for Lord Chancellor; he qualified at Lincoln's Inn and never practised a day, because he loathed the confusion, fictions and delays of English law and resolved to spend his life reforming it. His father's estate let him write without earning.

In 1776 he anonymously published A Fragment on Government attacking Blackstone's praise of the English constitution, and in 1789 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which opens by declaring that nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, which point out what we ought to do and determine what we shall do. Every law and act is to be judged by whether it increases or diminishes the total happiness of those affected, and he devised a 'felicific calculus' weighing intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent.

He spent twenty years promoting the Panopticon, a circular prison in which a guard in a central tower sees every inmate while remaining unseen, so that prisoners discipline themselves. The government finally rejected it, and in fury he turned to radical democracy, demanding universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords. His followers became the 'philosophic radicals', of whom James Mill and his son John were the most important; he died just as the Reform Act of 1832 passed.

He wrote for decades and rarely finished, leaving tens of thousands of manuscript pages, most still being edited today. He opposed religion, argued for decriminalising homosexuality, and defended animals from suffering, saying the question is not whether they can reason but whether they can suffer. By his will his body was dissected and made into an 'auto-icon', dressed in his own clothes, which still sits in a glass case at University College London.