Bentham, Foucault, and 1792

The French revolution produced revulsion amongst many observers. While many initially supported its aims, as time went on and the revolutionaries became bloodier, admiration faded.

Bentham became famous for his critique of the ostensibly liberating idea of natural rights as stated in the Declaration of Rights published by the French National Assembly in 1791. He took the declaration sentence by sentence, and subjected it to a withering attack. Thus his critique of the sentence ‘The end in view of every political association, is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ asserts:¹

More confusion — more nonsense, — and the nonsense, as usual, dangerous nonsense. The words can scarcely be said to have a meaning: but if they have, … these would be the propositions either asserted or implied: –

1. That there are such things as rights anterior to the establishment of governments: for natural, as applied to rights, if it mean anything, is meant to stand in opposition to legal — to such rights as are acknowledged to owe their existence to government….  

Bentham acknowledges rights given in law, but not rights preceding government – natural rights. Thus he makes his famous declaration:²

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts.  

Bentham continues:³

But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense: for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

So much for terrorist language.

So, Bentham argues:⁴

Remember the ides of September [1792] is a momento I always conceive of as given when I hear of natural rights: where this is the imagery displayed in front, I always see in the background a cluster of daggers or of pikes introduced in the National Assembly with the applause of the President Condorcet for the avowed purpose of exterminating the King’s friends. Of late these pikes and daggers have been exhibited in broad day, and pointed out to reasonable and reasoning men, as gibbets used to be to murderers and thieves. But though till lately kept behind the curtain, they were always at hand, and but too close to the elbow of many a well-meaning man who hardly suspected how near he was to use them, or how void of all meaning his discourse, his politics, his fancied philosophy was, except in so far as he meant to use them.  

Thus J. H.. Burns suggests that ‘In a real sense, then, the French Revolution made possible the creation of Benthamism’.⁵

The Contrast, Thomas Rowlandson, 1792

Published on behalf of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 1792. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum, London.

There remains a strong element of bloodiness in the ambitions of some French philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault spring to mind. Jacques Rancière’s call for actions which ‘can provoke fear, and so hatred’ is not far behind.⁶ Foucault declared:⁷

When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.  

This last sentence in particular is especially chilling, coming from one supposedly used to thinking things through. For Foucault, in relation to justice, the role of the state is to:⁸

educate the masses and the will of the masses in such a way that it is the masses themselves who come to say, ‘In fact we cannot kill this man’ or ‘In fact we must kill him’.  

Actually, Foucualt did change his mind somewhat when he discovered that the proletariat might well consider putting homosexuals on the hit-list given that, according to La Cause du Peuple, homosexuality was a product of bourgeois corruption.⁹ Whoops.

Foucault, who was pretty keen to associate himself with slaughter,¹⁰ celebrated the events of September 1792 in his discussion with Pierre Victor in 1972. An appropriate response to a particular problem, he thinks. ¹¹

 What is interesting is that this schism has been around for 200 years, and, so long as some intellectuals continue to glorify violence and to support and elevate their fellows who do likewise, that schism is unlikely to go away. Mao was trained in Paris, Pol Pot and his unfortunate comrades were trained in Paris. Many intellectuals look to to Paris for their inspiration.¹² The French revolution marches on in direct oppostion to the ambitions of Benthamism.

Next will be a discussion of the methods of peaceful protest developed by Francis Place and others, exemplified in the Charter and put into practice with moral-force Chartism.

1. 1. Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution – an Examination of the Rights of Man and the Citizen Decreed by the Constituent Assembly in France,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring 1. (Edinburgh: William Tate, 1843). Vol 2, 500 [↩]
2. 2. Ibid. 501 [↩]
3. 3. Ibid. 501 [↩]
4. 4. Jeremy Bentham, in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, ed. Stark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952-1954.). i, p. 336.) [↩]
5. 5. J. H. Burns, “Bentham and the French Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (1966). 114 [↩]
6. 6. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, (trans Steve Corcoran), Verso, London, 2006, p97. For context see also pp  73, 85, 93, 96, 97. Especially 96 re wresting power. [↩]
7. 7. “Interview with Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky” in Fons Elders, Reflexive Water – The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Condor, 1974 182. See also “Interview with Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky.” 183. In Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. 201 Chomsky describes Foucault as ‘completely amoral’. [↩]
8. 8. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980). 13. [↩]
9. 9. See in  David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993) 304  [↩]
10. 10. See quotes above. Note also the the paper La Cause du Peuple was put out by La Gauche Proletarienne, a Maoist organisation with an armed wing. Foucualt had close connections with the organisation. In addition, Ranciere associated with the group, and Foucualt’s lover was a member. For Ranciere’s association see ‘Introduction’  in The Nights of Labor, xvii. [↩]
11. 11. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists” in Power/Knowledge,  1-2. See also page 6 for Foucault’s support for the revival of customs such as extra-judicial decapitation, again employing the pike as a method of display. See also pages 12, 13, 28, 33, 36 in all of which Foucault discusses the merit and implementation of extra-judicial killing. See also David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993). 299 and James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 205. Note at Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault. 184 mention of Foucault’s obsession with his media presentations and insistence on editorial control. These are not accidental declarations. [↩]
12. 12. See re Pol Pot and Sartre in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988, and this article from the Wall Street Journal [↩]