Bentham and Tocqueville on Pauperism

Alexis de Tocqueville and Jeremy Bentham belong to two different generations. When Tocqueville made his firt trip to the South of England in 1833 and, the following year, when the publication of De la Démocratie en Amérique launched his career as a successful political writer, Bentham had died a couple of years before. Bentham had certainly never heard about a young hopeful French writer called Tocqueville. At least there is no mention of his name in Bentham’s Works and Correspondence and why should there be? However Bentham’s theories were not unknown to Tocqueville, more particularly those related to prisons. Tocqueville became acquainted with Bentham’s Panopticon when he and Gustave de Beaumont were commissioned by the French Interior Ministry to write a report on the American prison system which was subsequently published under Du système pénitentianire aux États-Unis in 1831

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