Bentham’s Calculus: The Economy of Coercion and Mechanisms of Security

For Bentham, security is the ultimate goal of governmental intervention and the fundamental criterion for deter, mining how and to what extent the government should intervene. It consists of two intertwined dimensions, one of which is the protection of the ordinary course of life against all forms of interruption and encroachment, including crime, and the second is the safeguarding of people’s expectations about the future, above all their expectations regarding property. At the heart of this conception of security lies a concern to preserve and maintain the social order and its existing distribution of property. As the ultimate criterion, “security” becomes the guiding principle that shapes Bentham’s economy of coercion. He seeks to translate this economy into practice through various tech, nologies of power and security mechanisms, which he categorises as “direct” and “indirect legislation”. In practical terms, these manifest institutionally in forms such as “preventive police”, “industry houses” or the “penitentiary”. Although Bentham frequently and emphatically condemns coercion, repression and punishment in his writings, a closer examination reveals that this is not a normative moral judgement, but rather an economic evaluation; for the forms of intervention he envisages do not exclude coercion, but instead transform it into a usable resource to be employed strategically — depending on the extent to which the ultimate goal of “security” is perceived to be under threat. This article analyses the fundamental and intrinsic relationship between liberalism and coercion by considering Bentham’s calculative approach to governmental interventions within this framework.