JEREMY BENTHAM’S “PANOPTICON” AND ITS POSSIBLE ORIGINS

Abstract

The idea of a transpersonal judicial system in relation to the Middle Ages and Modern times was most fully developed in the works of Michel Foucault, who, nevertheless, relied in his calculations on the ideas of the English philosopher, sociologist and lawyer Jeremy Bentham. These ideas found their reflection in the famous Bentham’s treatise “Panopticon, or Supervisory House”, written in 1786–1787 in the form of letters and published with additions in 1791. The article traces the influence that the theory of “panopticism” had on the penitentiary systems of various countries, on the development of prison architecture, as well as on numerous dystopias which were also based on the idea of the “all-seeing eye”. However, the main attention is paid to the problem of authoritative sources which Jeremy Bentham himself could rely on. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that one of them could have been the English judicial system itself in the form in which it existed in the 16th–17th centuries. The judges of the early Modern times were perfectly familiar with the procedure of “watching” (i. e. the basic principle of the “panopticism” doctrine): it was widely applied in practice, primarily in the witch trials that took place in the English Kingdom in this time, and was described in various legal sources. Despite the fact that there are no direct references to these texts in the “Panopticon”, the very originality of this concept, as well as the use of very specific vocabulary, indicates, according to the author of the article, that Jeremy Bentham could rely directly on English experience in the field of legal proceedings.