'A Picture of the Treasury': The Panopticon Penitentiary, Bureaucracy, and Autobiography in the Writings of Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the philosopher and reformer, conceived of the panopticon-the all-seeing place-as a circular building enshrining the 'central inspection principle', whereby all activities could be supervised from a central location. Responding to the British government's need for a penitentiary following the end of transportation to America, in 'Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House' (1791) Bentham proposed to build a panopticon prison, where the governor in a central inspection tower might view all the prisoners housed in the cells on the periphery. Assuming that they were under constant surveillance, the prisoners would learn self-discipline and love of work, be reformed, and eventually released as useful citizens.

The panopticon has become one of the most iconic and controversial symbols in the humanities and social sciences as a result of French philosopher Michel Foucault's identification of it as a paradigm of the modern state. In Foucault's view, the panopticon enshrined the mechanisms employed by capitalist liberal democracies in order to discipline and subdue their populations. The idea of the panopticon has resonated in architecture, economics, history, law, management studies, philosophy, political science, and psychology, and has given rise to a whole new subject area-surveillance studies. The panopticon has been adopted by journalists and commentators as a metaphor for oppressive, all-encompassing surveillance in the digital age, and continues to prove fertile ground for reinterpretation by artists, musicians, and authors.

This enormous scholarly, intellectual, and creative endeavour, has, however, been based on inadequate and incomplete editions of Bentham's writings. Foucault's work and the subsequent scholarship has relied on inadequate or partial versions of Bentham's texts, while further hugely important manuscript material has never before been made available in an authoritative or accessible format. Hence, the centrepiece of this research will be a landmark resource: an authoritative version of Bentham's 'A Picture of the Treasury' for the critically acclaimed edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, together with a collection of interpretive essays, in both published and open-access formats. 'A Picture of the Treasury' will constitute an enduring contribution to future research in the humanities and social sciences by publishing for the first time Bentham's own intimate account of his involved and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Treasury and Home Office officials between 1798 and 1802 to build the panopticon penitentiary. As Bentham came to realize that the government were minded to set aside the panopticon scheme, despite Parliamentary approval and several years of negotiations, planning, and expenditure of public money, he suspected that officials were conspiring either to ruin him financially or even drive him to suicide.

The research will bring into the public domain for the first time, in authoritative form, a text that will bear comparison with such celebrated works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1782) and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873). 'A Picture of the Treasury', moreover, will contribute significantly to our understanding of the relationship between executive and legislature and to the inner workings of key administrative departments in the British government at the turn of the nineteenth century-and so constitute a real-life equivalent to Charles Dickens's circumlocution office in Bleak House-and add a new dimension to well-established debates concerning the emergence of the liberal state and its intellectual context.