Book: A Fragment on Government

Overview and Context
Jeremy Bentham’s A Fragment on Government (1776) is a sharply argued critique of Sir William Blackstone’s celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England. Published anonymously by a young Bentham, the treatise takes aim at the complacent reverence for the English constitution and common law that, in Bentham’s view, Blackstone enshrined. Bentham sets out to replace deference to antiquity, tradition, and vague appeals to natural law with a clear standard of evaluation: the principle of utility, or the promotion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The work’s title signals its incompleteness; it was intended as part of a larger project dismantling Blackstone’s introductory books but survives as a bracing fragment of method and doctrine.

Target and Method
Bentham accuses Blackstone of conflating description with praise. He distinguishes the tasks of the expositor, who tells what the law is, and the censor, who judges what it ought to be. Blackstone, he argues, does both at once and thereby shields English institutions from rational scrutiny. Instead of adducing reasons, Blackstone sanctifies existing arrangements by invoking a supposedly perfect common law, a balanced “mixed” constitution, and the wisdom of time. Bentham’s method is analytic: define terms, separate factual claims from normative ones, and test every rule and institution by its effects on human happiness.

The Principle of Utility and the Measure of Law
Utility supplies the single, public standard by which laws can be commended or condemned. A law is good insofar as it tends to increase the aggregate happiness by maximizing benefits and minimizing harms; it is bad when it does the opposite. Appeals to nature, custom, or the consent of an imagined social contract are, for Bentham, rhetorical disguises that divert attention from consequences. He acknowledges that utility is not a licence for arbitrary rule; rather, it is a discipline for legislators, compelling precise attention to the real interests of those governed and to the predictable effects, sanctions, incentives, and expectations, created by rules.

Sovereignty, Rights, and Positivism
Against Blackstone’s picture of a harmonious balance among king, lords, and commons, Bentham insists that every state has a determinate sovereign whose will, habitually obeyed, gives force to law. That insight underwrites a nascent legal positivism: law is the command of the sovereign backed by sanctions, not an emanation of reason or nature. In this view, rights are creations of law, not pre-political endowments; to secure liberty and property is to craft and maintain rules that reliably protect expectations. Talk of antecedent, inalienable rights misleads unless translated into specific legal protections whose utility can be assessed.

Critique of Common Law and the Case for Codification
Bentham’s attack on common-law reasoning is relentless. He faults judge-made law for obscurity, retroactivity, and a dependence on fictions that frustrate predictability and accountability. The praise of the common law’s “perfection” masks a system that often privileges professional guild interests over public welfare. Codification, clear, accessible, prospective statutes, would align legal order with utility by making duties and sanctions transparent, curbing judicial legislation, and enabling citizens to plan their affairs. He likewise challenges the complacent celebration of the English constitution’s checks and balances, arguing that only institutions designed with incentives that tie rulers’ interests to the public interest can reliably constrain power.

Significance
The fragment inaugurates key themes of Bentham’s mature philosophy: the sovereignty-centered analysis of law, the utilitarian criterion for assessing political arrangements, the exposure of fallacies that prop up reverence for the status quo, and the program of comprehensive legal reform and codification. While directed at Blackstone, its true ambition is to install utility as the common measure of jurisprudence and politics. That shift marks a turning point from traditional constitutional eulogy toward a modern, consequence-sensitive science of legislation.