Books, Arts & Manners: Bentham Lives!

The Soviet Worker Edited by Leonard Schapiro and Joseph Godson St. Martin’s, 291 pp., $18.95

Jeremy Bentham, the great reformer of the early nineteenth century who sought in vain a moral arithmetic, created out of his fertile and obsessive brain a scheme for an ideal prison-factory which he called the Panopticon, meaning, in Greek, “all-seeing.” The prison cells would be at the circumference of the five-story, star-shaped building. The prison-keeper—“the spider in the web,” as Burke, with characteristic acuity, called him, much to Bentham’s irritation— would be stationed in a tower at the center of the Panopticon from which he could keep all the prisoners under 24-hour observation, using a system of artificial lights and reflectors, with speaking tubes into each cell for transmission of his orders. By these means there would be created among the hapless prisoners “the illusion of a divine presence,” and the “multitude” of prisoners would be turned into a mass of “solitary and sequestered individuals.”

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Arnold Beichman

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The Soviet Worker Edited by Leonard Schapiro and Joseph Godson St. Martin’s, 291 pp., $18.95

Jeremy Bentham, the great reformer of the early nineteenth century who sought in vain a moral arithmetic, created out of his fertile and obsessive brain a scheme for an ideal prison-factory which he called the Panopticon, meaning, in Greek, “all-seeing.” The prison cells would be at the circumference of the five-story, star-shaped building. The prison-keeper—“the spider in the web,” as Burke, with characteristic acuity, called him, much to Bentham’s irritation— would be stationed in a tower at the center of the Panopticon from which he could keep all the prisoners under 24-hour observation, using a system of artificial lights and reflectors, with speaking tubes into each cell for transmission of his orders. By these means there would be created among the hapless prisoners “the illusion of a divine presence,” and the “multitude” of prisoners would be turned into a mass of “solitary and sequestered individuals.”