2Carrie D. Shanafelt writes a compelling essay on Bentham’s concern for equal and depenalized access to pleasure for those she calls the disenfranchised, that is women, the poor, the colonized and the enslaved, as well as sex and gender minorities. The shift from Campos-Boralevi’s ‘oppressed’ to Carrie D. Shanafelt’s ‘disenfranchised’ is telling as it points to a study of dispossession from a political rather than from a solely social point of view. And in doing so, she dusts up Bentham’s seemingly abstruse and repulsive authoritarian utilitarianism.

3Carrie D. Shanafelt’s line of argument is to show how Bentham challenged the normative perspective of all major eighteenth-century philosophers whose position she summarizes as ‘common sense’, which refers to ‘an internal faculty of the mind which organizes sensory experience into coherent ideas’ and which presumes the universality of the ‘heterosexual man of European descent’ (p. 3). She highlights the inconsistencies in the common sense argument which denies minorities the ability to pursue their own form of pleasure. Bentham becomes the champion of ‘uncommon sense’, as she titles her book, undermining ‘the pretense of disinterested judgment [as] yet another way in which the powerful oppress others’ (p. 25).

4Chapter one looks into the reasons why Bentham was wrongly criticized, dismissed or misread from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Chapter two explores Bentham’s theories on non-conforming pleasures, focusing on the subjectivity of pleasure and on the benefits of consensual human pleasure for society within a utilitarian regime that promotes the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Chapter three explains how the rights discourse, as embodied in declarations of rights, only serves to ‘undermine the legal and political means to obtaining redress for discrimination and disenfranchisement’ (p. 85). Carrie D. Shanafelt explains that the law must protect any form of individual pleasure, including sexual non-conforming ones, if it wishes to achieve the aim of maximizing the happiness of the community. Chapter four addresses the figure of a Queer Christ, centering on Mark the Evangelist’s description of a young naked man with the sindona. It discusses the proposition that according to Bentham, ‘happiness […] may be derived from a wide variety of endeavors, but the very surest and least destructive means to human happiness must be nonreproductive sexual pleasure’ (p. 112). Chapter five explores the poetic connections in Bentham’s work, both in his writings, in his taste for gothic novels and in shared concerns with contemporary radical poets, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley.

5As well as drawing on Bentham’s writings on sex, on the grounds that ‘these manuscripts offer a coherent stunningly radical argument for the full enfranchisement of sexual minorities […] as a step towards truly egalitarian reform of the law that could facilitate an unprecedented diversity of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral perspectives to participate as equals in the public sphere’ (p. 20), Carrie D. Shanafelt relies heavily on Bentham’s works on religion (Not Paul, but Jesus (2013)), on colonies (‘Emancipate their Colonies !’ (1830) and ‘Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria’ (1995)), on the poor laws (Writings on the Poor Laws, vol. 1 (2001)) and on rights (‘Nonsense Upon Stilts’ (1795)), alongside the expected references to Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), and Deontology, Together with a Table of Springs of Action (1983). In doing so, she not only offers a reassessment of Campos-Boralevi’s study of the oppressed, she provides a new reading of Bentham’s philosophy and legacy. Instead of Bentham being the ‘inhumane calculator’ (p. 36) he is often portrayed to be by the likes of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx to name just a few, Carrie D. Shanafelt manages to show that his work is ‘devastating in its compassion, rage and desire for justice for disenfranchised groups’ (p. 36).

6Thanks to her reading of Bentham’s thought, Carrie D. Shanafelt proves that protecting sexual nonconformity is not an insignificant and useless aim, but rather a political act which safeguards the rights of the community as a whole against sinister interests. She concludes :

Using the example of sexual nonconformity, Bentham shows us why we cannot trust a tiny minority of self-interested persons – who control the government, the economy, the church, and philosophical discourse – to decide whose pleasures are a crime. (p. 159)

7While Carrie D. Shanafelt manages to write a compelling defense of Bentham, both informed and well written, she overlooks some of unresolved paradoxes Bentham scholars have been grappling with for generations. When it comes to religious minorities, Lea Campos-Boralevi had already highlighted to what extent Bentham’s call for religious toleration of Judaism conflicted with his disparaging comments on Eastern European Jewish communities in his correspondence in 1780s. Even more disturbing are Bentham’s positions towards the colonized and oppressed indigenous communities that have come to light with the publication of his The Panopticon versus ‘New South Wales’, and Other Writings on Australia, eds. T. Causer and P. Schofield (2021). These two oversights excluded, Carrie D. Shanafelt is an enthusiastic supporter of Bentham’s compassionate philosophy, and her Uncommon Sense : Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste is an essential read to understand the power of Bentham’s utilitarianism for 21st century readers, heteronormative and disenfranchised alike.