Jeremy Bentham's rational inhumanity
Bentham's plan for 250 privately owned for-profit workhouses provides a fascinating window into the minds and morals of the 19th century English ruling class
Amidst the renegotiation of the social contract between the ruling class and the poor who were forced into wage labor in the cities during the Industrial Revolution, there were a flurry of anti-poor laws passed. These laws were passed in an effort to control the poor, keep them subservient and easily managed, and punish harshly crimes against property.1
The Workhouse Act of 1723 was one such law. It authorized any parish in the country to build its own workhouse. It further allowed parishes to deny their parishioners any poor relief and to instead commit them to the workhouse. By the end of the century, there were some two thousand workhouses in England, with ninety in London alone. Workhouses provided a means to incarcerate large populations of poor people and provided nearly free labor for manufacturing.
Proponents of the workhouse indicated that its purpose was not to provide a living for its residents, but to bend them to submission, making them more docile and easy to control in society. Though the quality of life varied dramatically from workhouse to workhouse depending on the wealth and resources of individual parishes, city workhouses were almost uniformly squalid and destitute places. Mortality rates for children in these city workhouses were very high, with as many as half of infants dying before their second birthday in London workhouses during the 1750s.2
Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher and a vocal proponent of workhouses (and envisioner of the infamous Panopticon incarceration system), wrote extensively about his vision for a system of 250 enormous, privately funded workhouses throughout England in his tract Situation and Relief of the Poor.3
The workhouse plans were submitted as a manuscript to the journal The Annals of Agriculture. He introduces his analysis by assuring the editor that
THE stock of information here in question constitutes what will be found to be an indispensable groundwork to every well-digested plan of provision that can be framed in relation to the Poor. For some of the classes a peculiar mode of provision is requisite, different as between class and class; as in the case of infants, lunatics, idiots, the deaf and dumb, and the blind. The rate of neat expense per head, as between class and class, is also susceptible of a very extensive scale of variation: the quantum and value of return, actual or possible, in the way of labour, by the produce of such labour, is again susceptible of a scale prodigiously more extensive.
Bentham’s writing throughout the manuscript is extraordinary, both for its level of detail as to how every facet of the workhouse and workers’ lives would be conducted, and for how utterly and completely he dehumanizes the poor would-be occupants.
He supplies numerous tables and analyses which reduce the poor to a description of their infirmities and their ability to provide labor and generate profit, enumerating over 100 categories of human chattel, which he refers to as “national live stock which has no feathers to it, and walks upon two legs”.
These categories are organized conceptually under the rubric of “hands”, with different types of hands denoting different categories of workhouse residents/laborers
The word Hands is chosen, as bearing reference to Employment, serving thereby to point the attention to the consideration of the Employments, to which the persons thus characterized may respectively be competent or incompetent.
Bentham’s “Hands” include
Insane hands: people Bentham terms “idiots” or “lunatics”
Imperfect hands: various disabled or crippled people
Feeble hands/sick and well hands/tender hands: those suffering from chronic conditions or diseases
Unripe hands: underage children
Child burthen’d hands: nursing mothers
Unavowed employment/lazy hands: those unwilling to work
Out-of-place/casual-stagnation/periodical stagnation hands: those out of work for various reasons
Disbanded hands: discharged military personnel
Superseded hands: those unemployed due to industrialization
Stigmatized hands: pardoned criminals or those who have served their sentence
Unchaste hands: prostitutes, mothers of bastards, loose women, brothel keepers (women), procuresses
Strange hands: immigrants
Bentham’s vision describes how a “class” composed of those who suffer from “infirmity… whether of mind or body”, might be placed in “appropriate establishments” to consolidate the cost of caring for them, and that “a quantity of profit might be extracted from their labor”. These “infants, lunatics, idiots, the deaf and the dumb, and the blind… and various sorts of cripples”, and in fine “all persons, having neither visible or assignable property” are to be placed in “industry houses”, where they will be cared for and provide labor for profit.
He goes into great detail providing an estimate of the “value” of all of these poor people, For example, for children; “The value of a child, in this point of view, will depend not only upon the present value, positive or negative, but upon the quantity of negative value past, and the quantity of positive value yet to come”.
Bastard children are especially useful, for, being devoid
of any special attachment to person or to place, nor any other individual being likely to possess any very special attachment with regard to them, this absence of natural connexion might afford room for transferring them, without hardship, and in any numbers, to any proper situation or situations.
His arrangement of the poor in the workhouses is unintentionally humorous in its unbelievable callousness and complete debasement
General principle with regard to arrangement, as between class and class, in point of vicinity. Next to every class, from which any inconvenience is to be apprehended, station a class unsusceptible of that inconvenience. Examples: 1. Next to raving lunatics, or persons of profligate conversation, place the deaf and dumb, if (included in the same establishment, and) separated as to sight. 2. Next to prostitutes, and other loose women, place the aged women. 3. Within view of the abodes of the blind, place melancholy and silent lunatics, or the shockingly deformed. 4. Next to each married couple (as before) place at bed-time a set of children under the age of observation. Barrier-Ward—a ward interposed for making the separation the more perfect between a ward occupied by a class considered as noisome or dangerous, and another considered as susceptible: classes that, for one or other of the above purposes, require separation as between class and class.
The lazy aren’t to be given food until they have worked for it, the indigenous or “quasi indigenous” are to be experimented upon with the “cheapest food in point of quality”, everyone is to be required to wear uniforms, they are referred to as “stock” throughout, with provision for moving “dead stock”, meaning redundant labor above and beyond the profit margin, to more appropriate areas of employment.
All of this is to be done by compulsion, and Bentham would grant any person the authority to “apprehend beggars” and take them to the workhouse or the constable. For this he would provide an incentive, in the form of a reward of 10 or 20 shillings, to be “charged to the beggar’s account”, which must then be worked off by the beggar before they would be eligible for release. The poor would thus be made to pay for their own incarceration.
It is clear that Bentham sincerely views this as a better arrangement than what the poor would experience in the streets. What is equally clear, however, is the degree to which he views the poor as a separate, debauched, repugnant class of people, fundamentally different from those able to work or the wealthy elites. No thought is given to their humanity outside of viewing them as an aggregate nuisance, a problem to be dealt with. This problem stands in the way of creating a perfect society, which he is convinced his workhouse plan will usher in
By this plan might be accomplished—and that in a degree little short of perfection—upon an all comprehensive scale—and not only without expense, but with profit—what at a vast expense, and with inadequate powers, a most respectable Society have so long been striving at, upon a comparatively minute scale.
His solution, to incarcerate these people involuntarily, with the added bonus of extracting profit from their labor, previews the rise of the current era’s for-profit prison system. Notwithstanding his framing of his proposal as a humane solution to a dire societal problem, Bentham himself would have benefited handsomely from his proposed “utopia”, humbly offering himself as the owner, manager, and jailer.
Bentham’s detailed plans for his workhouses give a fascinating and sobering insight into the prevailing views of the wealthy and propertied in England at the time. While some of these views can be rationalized and dismissed as the product of a less-enlightened and humane age, the core belief that the wealthy are fundamentally different and better than the poor is something that persists today. Dressed up in more palatable language, this pernicious belief continues to contribute to widescale dehumanization and immiseration.
See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Verso, 1991), for details of these laws.
Anthony Brundage, The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930 (London: Red Globe Press, 2017).
From Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Volume 8: Chrestomathia, Essays on Logic and Grammar, Tracts on Poor Laws, Tracts on Spanish Affairs (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), retrieved online from http://bev.berkeley.edu/PE%20100/On%20Pauper%20Laws%20-%20Bentham.pdf
We’ve come a long way. I wonder what Bentham would make of the world today?