Jeremy Bentham Review at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007
Malcolm Stewart – John Lewis Edinburgh Chronicle, 18 August 2007
JEREMY BENTHAM: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Rating: five stars
“A production likely to leave the viewer deeply engrossed … themes will ring a familiar bell with Partners.”
The phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ probably rings a bell with most Partners who recall Spedan Lewis’s first principle in the constitution – the Partnership’s ultimate purpose is the happiness of all its members.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an 18 th century political philosopher, part of what’s now known as the Enlightenment. Alongside such prominent Scots as David Hume and Adam Smith, Bentham, an Englishman, sought to scientifically order the world from a place of the Divine Right of Kings to a peaceful, happier world.
He was a utilitarian, where things were ordered by their usefulness, and believed rights to be ‘nonsense on stilts’.
Bentham was raised on John Milton’s Paradise Lost and believed that the only way that paradise on earth could be regained was through six fundamental things: happiness, compassion, wisdom, justice, integrity, and friendship.
Bentham pursued the idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number relentlessly, believing it the only way forward, through democracy for all; he was dismayed at the poverty in Britain and throughout the world, and allied himself alongside Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations – as nations became richer, he believed, so would their citizens become wealthier by virtue of hard work. The problem is that the greatest happiness for the greatest number means that there is a minority who are not happy.
Incensed by war, which he abhorred, Bentham believed in internationalism, and an international court of law. In future, he hoped, wars would be contested in a courtroom rather than a battlefield. He was instrumental in Wilberforce’s Abolition of Slavery Act.
His ideas manifested themselves in the United Nations and the International Court of Justice established at The Hague in 1946, in the welfare state, and in the Human Rights Act.
The Radicals are a troop of very enthusiastic actors, mainly sixty plus. Their programme says that their plays ‘do not require the learning of lines’, which explains why each actor clutches their scripts. Even so, I was engrossed by this tale of an 18 th century philosopher and how his thoughts still have an important bearing on the world today.