Jeremy Bentham is one of those figures whose name can feel like a label—“utilitarian,” “reformer,” “the greatest happiness principle”—until you pause and remember that a label is never the person. Bentham lived a whole life inside an age that was remaking itself with startling speed. He was born in London in 1748, in the long afterglow of the Scientific Revolution and right in the middle of the Enlightenment. He died in 1832, the same year Britain passed the Reform Act that began, however imperfectly, to widen political representation. Between those dates you can feel the world shifting beneath his feet: the growth of commerce and industry, the swelling of cities, the hardening of class lines, and the rise of modern state administration. Bentham is not a thinker who hovers above that transformation. He dives into it. He tries to grab the machiner ...