• 1 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty Part 1,’ ed. Louis Crompton, Journal of H (...)
• 2 Cf. Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed (Walter DeGruyter, 1984).

1Although Jeremy Bentham’s extensive writings on sexuality have been a topic of curiosity since his death, before the last decade, surprisingly little scholarship on Bentham has taken up these papers as central to his political, ethical, and theological analysis. Since Louis Crompton’s 1978 edition of ‘Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty Part 1,’ consisting of Bentham’s 1785 argument for the decriminalization of same-sex intimacy,1 several of Bentham’s later and more radical manuscripts on sexuality have been brought to light, showing that his former advocacy for legal toleration of sexual difference evolved into outright celebration, and began to reshape his understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and theology, in addition to law. While these papers have been intriguing to historians of sexuality and radical political movements, such as Lea Campos Boralevi,2 they also reveal profound rifts between Bentham and other utilitarians, past and present, such that ‘utility’ itself must be reinterrogated.

• 3 Bentham, Jeremy, Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, ed. Philip Schofi (...)

2Thanks to editors Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Michael Quinn, the 2014 publication of another set of Bentham’s manuscripts in Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality began to excite broader philosophical interest.3 These essays from the 1810s demonstrate the evolution of Bentham’s thought on sexuality since the 1780s; notably, he began to use ‘sexual nonconformity’ and ‘sexual irregularity’ to reflect a politically neutral perspective on same-sex intimacy and other sexual practices. These later papers reveal how crucial sexual toleration became to Bentham’s political and theological radicalism. Since the publication of this volume, several new threads of scholarship on Jeremy Bentham have emerged, reevaluating Bentham’s published work and reputation in the light of these and other (as yet) unpublished manuscripts on varieties of sexual pleasure.

• 4 Engelmann, Stephen G., ‘Queer Utilitarianism: Bentham and Malthus on the Threshold of Biopolitics,’ (...)

3In his article ‘Queer Utilitarianism: Bentham and Malthus on the Threshold of Biopolitics,’ Stephen Engelmann explores how Bentham’s later radical writings on sexuality expose this rift between Bentham and Robert Malthus. Engelmann shows that, although both were concerned with population control, Bentham rigorously adheres to individual pleasure as the summum bonum that justifies any exercise of biopolitical power. He writes, ‘[I]t is [Bentham’s] insistence on taking his bearings from pleasure alone that makes these writings on sex worth revisiting in the face of our persistent tendency to discipline political challenges into genetically-tractable qualities of self, fit or unfit for selective development.’4 As Engelmann suggests, Bentham’s sexuality papers not only have surprising consequences for studies of utilitarian biopolitical history; they also offer a non-identitarian justification for toleration of nonconforming sexual practices.

• 5 Waldschmidt, Stefan, ‘Bentham, Pater, and the Aesthetics of Utilitarian Sex,’ Nineteenth-Century Co (...)

4For Stefan Waldschmidt, Bentham’s sexual nonconformity papers also suggest a liberatory relationship with biopolitical power and forced reproduction, in ways that anticipate the later aestheticists Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde ‘in proposing a hedonistic philosophy that might trade away the possibility of a future for the sake of pleasures that are palpably present.’5

• 6 Quinn, Malcolm, ‘Jeremy Bentham on Liberty of Taste,’ History of European Ideas 43:6 (2017), p. 616

5In ‘Jeremy Bentham on Liberty of Taste,’ Malcolm Quinn draws on the Of Sexual Irregularities essays and others to show how Bentham’s writings on sexuality constitute a correction to the aesthetic theory of David Hume, demonstrating that individual pleasure, not social consensus, must be the basis of aesthetic judgment, without recourse to a hierarchy of good and bad taste. ‘Bentham shows how the kind of passionate attachments that Hume sees as standing in the way of the cultivation of an unprejudiced sense of taste can defeat prejudice and produce social benefits without any recourse to refinement, education or restraint.’6

• 7 Ferguson, Frances, ‘Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste,’ Critical Inquiry 45 (2019), p. 579.

6Likewise, in ‘Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste,’ Frances Ferguson reads Of Sexual Irregularities to argue that Bentham’s most radical thinking on sexuality constitutes an indispensable improvement to the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. Bentham includes the sexual as a sixth sense subject to taste, differences in which are criminalized under English law, which, as Ferguson writes, was functionally ‘an aesthetic regime’ for prosecuting nonconformity.7

• 8 Koh, Tsin Yen, ‘Bentham on Asceticism and Tyranny,’ History of European Ideas 45:1 (2019), p. 3.

7In ‘Bentham on Asceticism and Tyranny,’ Tsin Yen Koh explores the manuscripts for the third volume of Not Paul, but Jesus, in which Bentham worked to show that asceticism in Christianity had no basis in the life or teachings of Jesus, but had been centralized by the sinister interests of government. Koh writes, ‘Bentham’s objections to the principle of asceticism were political in nature : the problem with the principle of asceticism, as a political principle, was that it provided ideological and practical support for tyranny.’8

• 9 Shanafelt, Carrie, Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (Uni (...)

8Finally, in my book Uncommon Sense : Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste, I argued for the liberatory possibilities of queer utilitarianism that centralizes individual pleasure, rather than taste, conformity, or economic projection, as the summum bonum of legal, theological, and aesthetic judgment.9