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The panopticon state wants your money Labour has contrived to do something very difficult indeed… they have made the ‘Conservative’ party look good. By announcing that failure to produce your ID card will make a person liable for a £1000 (about $1,850) fine if, for example, they cannot find and return the ID card of a recently dead relative, they have allowed David Davies, the Tory shadow home secretary to very reasonably point out that the ID card scheme…
…will hit the taxpayer not the terrorists” and is “just another Labour stealth tax” [..]”It is shocking that the Government is considering charges and fines on people at some of the most sensitive times in life. The Conservatives would scrap this plastic poll tax and invest the savings in practical measures to improve security.”
…which puts me in agreement with the ‘Conservative’ party and that does not happen very often.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Glad to see that the nightmare prison of Jeremy Bentham is still remembered.
The Panoptican – were constant observation was only one of the factors.
Being kept seminaked, and kept on a diet that was dirt cheap, and forced to work (as work is a pleasure not a pain, even Panopticon work – after all J.B. said so).
Unlike a “workhouse” people would not choose to go to the Panopticon because they had no other place to turn – no they would be taken there by violence.
But unlike a conventional prison, there would be no need to have committed a crime (as conventionally understood). But, after all, crime and law are just calculations of utility – as indeed is all good and bad (again because J.B. says so). So it is not a bad thing if someone is locked up (and so on) who has not aggressed against the body or goods of anyone.
As for leaving the Panopticon – that would possible (just about). But it would not like be leaving the Workhouse – no joy from the magistrates or (after 1834) the Poor Law Guardians that there was one less mouth to feed at the expense of the ratepayers.
Because the Panopticon would make a profit – that was one of the main points of the scheme (to J.B.).
As it would be privately managed and the private managers (who J.B. intended to be himself and his friends) they would make money from their system of slave labour (remember slavery is not bad in-its-self, only disutility is bad) unlike the workhouses under the old Poor Law or the workhouses of the new Poor Law (both of which made a big loss).
The idea was what would be called today a “public private partnership”, and depended on people being forced to enter, forced to work, and it being made very hard for them to leave.
In theory an inmate could leave, or rather be got out (there was no question of just leaving – like a prisoner at the end of his term) – but there were all sorts of problems with getting someone out, all sorts of things that had to be proved (to the satisfaction of the Philosophical Radicals).
For it was not just J.B. (although he spent more time trying to get the Panopticon than he did on any other project), it was his friend James Mill and the rest of the crowd that went to Lord Shelburne’s Bowood Circle (named after his house of course) – and before him to his forefather Sir William Petty (whose name he shared) and the rest of the mathematical school of politics (no wonder so many, although not all, of the Bowood circle were favourable to the French Revolution) – for Sir William was connected to Thomas Hobbes and he was connected to Francis Bacon (he of “The New Atlantis” a country of economic plainning by “scientfic” experts who in fact were supposed to suppress real science – such as the theory that the Earth went round the Sun).
But back to the early 19th century. Yes when James Mill was not defending the labour theory of value (by 1830 he was virtually the only economist in Britain who was still defending David Ricardo’s theory – but his son John Stuart Mill would help make it orthodoxy once again) and denoucing land owners (one can only own lots of land, according to the utilitarians, if it can be shown that this is for the utility of the population as a whole you see – and the burden of proof seems to be on the land owners, because the Philosophical Radicals did not like them) he was busy supporting J.B.s Panopticon scheme.
Sometimes I think the question “when did British liberalism go rotten” is vain – for I sometimes think it was always rotten.
Jeremy Bentham produced UCL. And UCL produced Ricky Gervais who produced David Brent. Enough said.
I don’t think British philosophers have ever been as good at upholding liberal principles as the common people and common law. Although I guess John Locke would count as “very good for his time” – pity about his position slavery!
The whole lecture is worth reading.
Merry Christmas.
In my study of Edmund Burke I never came upon anything evil.
That is high praise when one is dealing with politics and political thought.
Liberalism, like any other ideology, was a response to particular circumstances. More accurately it was a group of broadly similar responses, defined post facto. What it certainly isn’t is a set of doctrines in the ether waiting to be pulled out in purified form by those worthy enough.
Arguments about whether “Liberals” are really “Liberals” or not are in the end meaningless because it is no more possible to be a Classical Liberal today than it is to be a Maccabee. (How to manage the brekadown of feudalism and avoid absolutist monarchies aren’t our most pressing concerns for a start.) Modern Liberalism is related in innumerable ways to Classical Liberalism as is Libertarianism and Neoliberalism (and Conservatism – and, for that matter, Socialism), but neither are, or can be, the sole authentic holders of the Liberal tradition. I can admire Locke et al. just as I admire, with caveats, Judas Maccabeus, but just as I don’t base my vote on the pressing need to free ourselves from the Seleucid yoke, I don’t imagine myself to be a “Classical Liberal”.
At worst, this tendency degenerates into a vapid antiquarian attempt to classify everyone from Solomon to Sulemain either in my gang or among the evildoers. Popper falls into this trap when he places the early Christians as representatives of the Open Society and Pharisees of the closed. This is not only an eccentric judgement, but one that is completely meaningless. They fell out not over what matters to Popper, but over whether Jesus was the Christ. Our ancestors’ ideas were not merely primitive versions of our own, but meaningful in and of themselves. Our concerns were not their concerns, how could they have been?
My point being that the values we cherish, such as freedom, do not belong to any particular politcal/philosophical traidtion; thus to say that I don’t think British philosophers have ever been as good at upholding liberal principles as the common people and common law is correct, but these are not liberal traditions – they are far bigger and better than that.
I think Hayek and Von Mises got way too caught up in this, it matters not a jot to me whether J.S. Mill and Von Humboldt would approve of my positions.