The New American
No one ever accused Jeremy Bentham of thinking small. The early
18th-century British philosopher, social reformer, and co-founder of the
celebrated philosophical school of Utilitarianism, Bentham was known
for his unconventional ideas. Like many self-styled progressive thinkers
of his age, Bentham expended a considerable amount of energy dreaming
up new ways to use the power of the state to protect private citizens
from their own alleged follies.
The concept of the Panopticon was probably Bentham’s best-known
brainchild. An extravagant idea for its time, it has proven an enduring
metaphor in our time and — far more importantly — prefigured our modern
obsession with high-tech surveillance. Derived from Greek roots that
mean “all-seeing,” Bentham’s Panopticon was a building designed to house
many people in close quarters whose rooms were so configured that a
central authority, using a system of tubes and mirrors, could keep every
inmate under constant surveillance. The Panopticon concept could be
applied to prisons, factories, or any place where large numbers of
people would live or work in close quarters. “Morals reformed — health
preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — public
burthens [burdens] lightened — economy seated, as it were, upon a rock —
the Gordian knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied — all by a simple
idea in architecture,” Bentham enthused, proclaiming that his Panopticon
represented “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a
quantity hitherto without example.” The energetic Bentham tried to
persuade the British government to let him design a Panopticon prison,
but was ultimately unsuccessful. Although he managed to persuade Prime
Minister William Pitt the Younger of the Panopticon’s potential, Pitt’s
successor shut down the project.
But Bentham’s premise — of a
system of comprehensive state surveillance to guarantee a pliant and
docile citizenry — is still with us, magnified by the potency of
21st-century technology and zealously promoted the world over, but
especially in Western nations, like Great Britain and the United States,
that once viewed such state activities as abhorrent and dangerous to
liberty. A decade after the defining crisis of our era, the terrorist
attacks of 9/11, the United States of America is on the verge of
becoming a Panopticon society, with powers of state surveillance far
beyond the most fevered imaginings of Bentham and fellow pre-modern
utopians.-[Full Article]
