The Bentham Brothers Build a Panopticon
Samuel and Jeremy Bentham came from a well-off London family. Their father, Jeremiah, was a successful lawyer. Samuel, the younger brother, was born in 1757, and was mechanically inclined from a young age. He built a carriage for a childhood friend, Cornelia Knight (later a notable novelist and artist), and managed to convince his reluctant and disapproving father to allow him to go into shipbuilding. Of course, no Bentham was going to be a common shipwright: Jeremiah secured Samuel a top-tier apprenticeship, training for a supervisory position. In this position, he learned not only the craft of shipbuilding but the latest in geometry and mathematics, while pursuing studies in French and chemistry as well.
The Royal Dockyards Samuel entered as an apprentice were a patchwork of modern labor protections and ancient rights. They had a form of pension and a form of tenure (workers could generally count on lifetime employment). Workers had significant power, collectively, over the timing and intensity of their work. They lived in longstanding craft communities composed of friends and family, with centuries-old traditions. When managers threatened their pay or working conditions, shipbuilders reacted with well-coordinated strikes as well as quieter forms of subversion, like fudging paperwork to increase pay. They took care of each other and for the most part, within trades, made the same wage — an egalitarian tendency they defended proudly.
The yards were far from perfect, of course. Apprentices often suffered grievously, and egalitarianism often existed only within trades — shipwrights did not stand up for ropemakers, for instance. The work was hard, and the hours long. But it was one of the best places in England to be a worker.
The dockyard was a tight-knit and well-organized proletarian community brave enough to repeatedly and illegally strike and win. Samuel, however, was a lawyer’s son and the stepbrother of a future parliamentarian. The common men of the yards probably resented him, all stiff-backed in his fine clothes, a lawyer’s son who had parachuted in from the bourgeoisie because he liked ships but was more comfortable with a protractor than an adze. And he resented them in turn — slouched in their tradition, designing the most complicated weapons in the world by eye-balling it, working with rules of thumb instead of rules of math. His work ethic and attitude set him apart from the other elite apprentices as well. He refused to skip or slow work, as they often did, and was dedicated to his craft.
In the dockyard, Samuel developed the twin convictions that most anything could be done better than it was currently being done, and that he could figure out how this was possible. Scientific methods — examining, testing, comparing, and developing theories — were the means he relied upon in every area of work. While he learned shipbuilding from artisans and from hands-on experience, he also sought to advance knowledge of it in new ways. A private shipyard operator, in conversation with Jeremy, described Samuel’s work as a “second branch” of shipbuilding, better called “ ‘computing’ or ‘comparing’ or some such word.”
Like Samuel, Jeremy did not fit quite right in his own profession — law. Skeptical of fuzzy concepts like “natural rights,” as well as the blurry institutions that supposedly guarded them, Jeremy came to detest the legal system he had trained for. Instead of England’s common law, which relied heavily on judicial precedent, Jeremy preferred a system of civil law — a central body of codes, a scientific rule set for a scientific age. Jeremy’s worldview mirrored Samuel’s, and they developed their work and their philosophies together.
In 1775, Royal Dockyards shipwrights went on strike against a new work program developed along “self-interest” lines. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, had a simple plan to replace workers: pay was to be tied to productivity. The fastest workers would be paid more to get more work out of them, and based on the resulting improvements, the rest of the workforce could be fired to cut costs. In this way, Montagu hoped to fire half the shipwrights of the Royal Dockyards. Workers denounced this task work as “progressive suicide on our Bodies” and proudly rejected individual self-interest in favor of a semi-egalitarian, communal ethic. Dockyard artisans demanded an across-the-board pay raise, not mass firings and harder work for the rest.
They pursued these demands with petitions and strikes, coordinated across England. It took several months, but their strike halted Montagu’s plans. But workers did not have the last word. It is unclear exactly how Samuel felt about the strike, but it is not hard to guess. Samuel spent some of the strike period on a family trip to France, but he was certainly aware of it and was present in the dockyards when the strikes began in June.
The fact that the brothers were enemies of the existing “system of management” in courts and dockyards did not make them friends of shipwrights or prisoners. Jeremy opposed the vicious executions Britain conducted under what was known as the “Bloody Code,” but he proposed prisons for the poor instead of death. Samuel wanted the dockyards to be better managed, but for the purposes of the state rather than workers.
Both wished to optimize rather than replace existing hierarchies. Jeremy’s editor John Bowring quotes him as saying that in this era, he “never suspected that the people in power were against reform.” They only needed “to know what was good in order to embrace it.” In a slavery-funded empire that maintained power by the hangman’s noose, his naivete was stunning … and convenient. If all those in power needed to do good was a little knowledge, men like Jeremy were the solution.
Reformers rather than revolutionaries, they hoped to wield rather than challenge imperial power. As America rose up, the brothers fled Britain and headed for imperial Russia — Samuel first, in 1780, followed by Jeremy in 1786. There, Empress Catherine the Great wielded nominally absolute power, although in practice she was constrained by court politics and other forces in the state. In Russia, Samuel believed that he could practice his new science of shipbuilding unhindered by organized workers and entrenched bureaucracy. Jeremy, meanwhile, hoped that Catherine was the answer to his dreams of sweeping aside convoluted legal traditions: he believed that she could in a single stroke make the sweeping changes he wished to see. Russian autocracy, the Benthams imagined, could be a shortcut.
They could bypass institutions and authorities, customs and rights, and make labor and law as they should be with a wave of the empress’s hand.
Imagine for a moment that you are a Russian worker in St. Petersburg in late 1782. Your job is to drive piles into the ground using a towering contraption of weights and pulleys. By pulling on connected ropes, you and a squad of others lift a heavy weight and then release it to ram a pile into the ground for construction work, building piers and foundations. The work is immensely taxing, and it produces a natural rhythm: heavy pulling, brief rest.
One day a British man in his twenties marches into your workplace with a design for a machine supposedly meant to solve all of the problems with your work. Perhaps his proposals will protect your aching back. But no, Samuel Bentham’s problems are your employer’s problems, not your problems. Samuel has been traveling the country consulting for wealthy elites on how to optimize their estates; the previous year he worked on salt mines. He would like you to work faster and believes you are engaged in “habitual skulking.” But one man’s skulking is another man’s rest. The natural rhythm of pile-driving provides plenty of reasons for breaks, and your role in that rhythm makes it easier to create time for them.
Samuel has proposed a machine that would “put an end” to this rest by using you and your coworkers’ weight as well as your strength. His contraption is easier to move from point to point, which makes construction faster. Samuel’s first problem was not the efficiency of the machine, it was the efficiency of the workers — its entire purpose was to address skulking, according to his wife Mary’s later summary. While we do not have a diagram of Samuel’s pile-driving machine, Mary described it as “a kind of ladder which yielded downwards on every step that the men took,” presumably not unlike a StairMaster or a treadmill. This invention was one of the first in a series of contraptions he designed to control workers.
Samuel’s pile-driving machine was only the beginning. Between 1780 and 1791, his career took him far and wide across Russia, where he consulted on everything from salt mines to glassworks. Imperial Russia in this period was dominated by powerful nobles like Grigory Potemkin, a prince, lover, and favorite of the empress who directed Russian expansion onto the steppes near the Caspian Sea. This meant conquering Indigenous people in the kind of colonial expansion more commonly associated with Atlantic empires. Russia was not a commercial capitalist empire like Britain, but Potemkin and nobles like him promoted the latest in technology and hoped to profit off it. This, of course, was made easier by the widespread use of convict labor.
Samuel’s unwillingness to consider what workers wanted, and his willingness to wield power over them, reflect a broader personal tendency of his: in both his work and his personal life, Samuel could be a poor listener. In early 1783 he informed Jeremy he had fallen “deeply in love” with Countess Sophia Dmitrievna Matiushkina. The relationship was troubled by opposition from her family, and Samuel made matters worse by failing to listen to Sophia’s advice on how to navigate that opposition. At one point she was so distraught by a plan of his involving a letter that she broke social protocol at a party, publicly grabbed him by the arm, and begged him not to deliver it.
He did anyway. If Samuel was unwilling to listen to the advice of someone he loved, he was certainly not going to seek the perspective of the pump workers affected by his pile-driving machine. Whether they might be comfortable with “skulking,” or what they might feel was fair to do about it, did not influence his decision-making.
Throughout his career, Samuel treated labor as an engineering challenge. If he could determine an objectively superior method for joining planks or firing cannons, then why not do the same for workers? Skulking was as objectively undesirable as timber waste. He did not seriously consider any perspectives that might have challenged his own. He entrusted only himself with the responsibility of changing the world. Samuel combined this scientific elitism with penal labor exploitation, serving imperialism and aristocratic profit, to develop the Panopticon. After Samuel gained the favor of Potemkin, he went to work at his facilities in Krichev, where Potemkin manufactured tools for Russia’s imperial conquests. Samuel’s job, first and foremost, was to build ships. The younger Bentham was a talented shipwright, but his knowledge of shipbuilding and other enterprises was useless without other men to actually do and manage the work. He therefore invited British artisans to Russia. When they arrived, Samuel soon found out that these workers brought with them their own assumptions about what work was and how it should be governed. They treated orders and schedules as suggestions more than commands.
These men were not acting unruly. Rather, they were operating according to a different set of rules: the semi-egalitarian artisan moral economy of tradition rather than the Benthams’ nascent science of management. Samuel and Jeremy had come to Russia because of its authoritarianism, and they were not about to create an egalitarian workplace within it. Accordingly, Samuel devised a system to control English workers, train Russian serfs, and surveil foremen.
It began with the central inspection principle: workers should be watched at all times, working within “a building so contrived as that the whole of the operations carried on in it should be under observation from its centre.” Every aspect of production could then be overseen with the minimum number of managers, which was both more efficient and in line with Samuel’s belief in “individual responsibility” — the consolidation of final administrative authority in one person. The all-seeing manager could identify workers who needed further training, problems in the production process, or skulking, with ease.
Functionally, this system was meant to minimize the will of anyone not at its center while magnifying and extending the central manager’s agency across the entire workplace. Central inspection began as a particular solution to labor problems in Russian manufacturing, but Samuel always had broader goals. In the next few years, Bentham’s activities ranged from helping Potemkin win a war against the Ottomans with experimental ships to building a strange worm-like vessel for Catherine’s 1787 trip through new territories. It was on that trip that Potemkin, according to legend, built fake villages full of happy peasants for the empress to look at with pride. These infamous “Potemkin villages” did not in fact exist, but if they had, it would have been Samuel Bentham who built them.
Between 1786 and 1787, Jeremy visited his brother in Russia. Like Samuel, he hoped to use the empire as a laboratory. He planned to win Catherine over to his designs for a comprehensive and entirely new legal code based on his mathematical morality. John Locke, Joseph Priestley, and Adam Smith had all tempered their views of calculable happiness with an inconsistent but real belief in rights and ethics. Jeremy avoided internal contradictions by abandoning these incalculable things altogether. Rights, in his formulation, were “nonsense upon stilts,” inefficient barriers that got in the way of social optimization through law. Even emotions could be reduced to math. “Passion calculates,” he insisted. Bentham expanded on Smith’s economic arguments while abandoning his ethics, just as he adopted Locke’s vision of self-interest without his vision of political rights.
Underlying this was an extreme adoption of Lockean psychological egoism. “Nature,” Jeremy wrote in 1789, “has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” “Right and wrong,” he wrote, “[and] causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.” Behavior had to be predictable and controllable if it was going to be manipulated by calculation — and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, as it came to be known, was defined by cold calculation above all else. The right thing to do was whatever produced the most pleasure and the least pain for the largest number of individuals.
On the surface, this may not sound like a bad thing, and to someone in the Benthams’ position, a mathematical ethics had undeniable appeal. Philosophy seemed to create problems, while science and mathematics solved them. English intellectuals had already been calling for a calculated remaking of the world along empiricist principles, and rapid advances in science could only make a believer in this vision more confident in the possibility of achieving it. Bentham read the writings of, corresponded with, and met men stumbling through new discoveries: oxygen! Electricity! Steam power! Day by day, more and more of the world could be described by equations and manipulated by engineers. Jeremy hoped to do the same with law.
This was the motivation behind his plans for legal reform, which he meant to advance during his visit with Samuel in Krichev. Jeremy was not content to stew in these ideas or write a few pamphlets, but he was spectacularly unsuccessful in winning Catherine over to his schemes. For a practical philosopher, the introverted Jeremy was poor at advocating his ideas within the halls of power. He failed to finish his legal code before the opportunity to meet the empress arrived, and when it did, he made sure not to meet the woman on whom his plans hinged.
With his own plan foundering, he latched instead onto his brother’s promised labor control schemes. Working together, they developed the central inspection principle into the circular concept known as the Panopticon. In the hands of the philosopher and erstwhile jurist, Samuel’s idea became the foundation for an improvement, a project that channeled a century of political economists’ obsessions through the person of Jeremy Bentham into a building made to change the world. When Jeremy and Samuel returned to England, they brought this project home with them.
From Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World by Henry Snow. Copyright © 2026 by Henry Snow. Published by Verso. Used by permission of the publisher.
