It is easy to make fun of Bentham\u2019s ideas.\u00a0 But much of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted.\u00a0 In Bentham\u2019s lifetime,\u00a0Parliamentary deliberations were confidential.\u00a0 Bentham\u2019s arguments forced them into the sunlight.\u00a0\u00a0Legal decisions and statute books were accessible only to lawyers and judges.\u00a0 Bentham\u2019s arguments led to codification of the law, and increasingly accessible legal rules.\u00a0\u00a0Bentham was\u00a0far ahead of his time — the first modern information theorist.\u00a0\u00a0The idea that all actions of government would be presumptively available for public review did not become part of U.S. law until the passage of the Freedom of Information Act<\/a> (FOIA)\u00a0 in 1967.\u00a0 As we speak, it appears the English parliament<\/a> is only now learning Bentham\u2019s message about publicity<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bentham\u2019s contemporary William Blackstone<\/a> celebrated the fact that \u201cprivate vices\u201d were\u00a0beyond the jurisdiction of the state.\u00a0 Privacy for him was an organizing principle of civilized society.\u00a0 But Blackstone believed in an all-seeing God to whom we would be accountable even for our private sins and thoughts.\u00a0 Bentham, a thoroughgoing atheist, hated Blackstone and all he stood for.\u00a0 For him the logical truth remained that people who believed themselves to be monitored behaved more responsibly than those who believed themselves to be alone.\u00a0 So Bentham asked himself: in the absence of God, how can a secular society operate without perpetuating Panoptic structures of surveillance? But why do our intuitions revolt?\u00a0 What can our brains say to explain this revulsion?\u00a0 What is so important about privacy?\u00a0 Judge Posner<\/a> has pointed out that when people are given a right to privacy, they use it to conceal discrediting information about themselves from others \u2013 and consequently mislead and defraud them.\u00a0 In a world increasingly characterized by exchanges of information, should we not all just abandon the attempt to maintain privacy, and embrace the Panopticon?\u00a0 We are, of course, all familiar with the dark side of the Panopticon \u2013 the fictional surveillance state of George Orwell\u2019s <\/a>1984,<\/em> or the actual surveillance states in Eastern Europe in the second half of the last century.\u00a0 But as Bentham knew, and his\u00a0modern disciple David Brin<\/a> has explained at greater length, the Orwellian nightmare\u00a0state is impossible when the Panopticon works both ways \u2013 when the government itself is watched \u2013 when the surveillor knows himself to be surveilled.\u00a0 Still, our intuitions rebel, but we are unable to respond to\u00a0Bentham’s utilitarian\u00a0logic.<\/p>\n So let us return again to the South Cloisters of University College and the question we began with: what could have possessed Bentham to do what he did with his last remains?\u00a0 The answer seems to be compelled by the same bloodless logic the man applied in all other aspects of his life.\u00a0 Bentham, the great apostle of publicity, rejected even the privacy of the grave \u2013 he remains the eternal observer, continuing his surveillance of the living from his perch among the dead.<\/p>\n Further reading:<\/p>\n OF PUBLICITY AND PRIVACY, AS APPLIED TO JUDICATURE IN GENERAL, AND TO THE COLLECTION OF THE EVIDENCE IN PARTICULAR<\/a>. – Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 6 [1843]<\/p>\n \u00a0Bentham’s Panopticon Letters <\/a><\/p>\n Peter A. Winn has served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the United States Department of Justice since 1994. He is also is an part-time lecturer at the University of Washington Law School w<\/a>here he teaches privacy law and health care fraud and abuse, and is a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne<\/a> where he teaches cybercrime.\u00a0 The views represented in this article are Mr. Winn’s personal views and not those of the United States Department of Justice.<\/p>\n VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first met Jeremy Bentham as a newly arrived philosophy student walking through the South Cloisters of University College London.\u00a0 Behind the plate glass of a huge mahogany case, I looked in upon a seated life-size wax figure of a man in an 18th Century coat and knee britches, happily wearing a straw hat.\u00a0 Only […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[231,92],"tags":[230,4969],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Foucault's](\"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/files\/2009\/07\/panopticonfoucault.jpg\")
When Michael Foucault<\/a> argued that Bentham\u2019s Panoptic structures had become essential to the functioning of a modern secular state, he did not claim originality for the insight.<\/p>\n