Tearing Down Telos: Usury and Sodomy in Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was the first to argue in print for the legalization of both “usury” and “sodomy.” In doing so, he draws on an ancient tradition in Western philosophy, which constructed nonprocreative sexuality (“sodomy”) and autoreproductive money (“usury”) as twin appearances of a single essence. In this Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, the essential unity of sodomy and usury lay in their homologous violation of natural teleology. Both activities were condemned as autotelic, or “ends in themselves,” and Bentham was able to vindicate them both by rationalizing their departures from telos. By examining his response to Adam Smith’s innovative economics, and by comparing his ideas to the Marquis de Sade’s “philosophy of the bedroom,” this essay argues for the comprehensive radicalism of Bentham’s thought. The fact that moneylending and nonprocreative sexuality were widely practiced meant, for Bentham, that it was worse than useless to prohibit them. In fact, he concluded, their customary practice proved that they were natural. Bentham’s radical reconsideration of sodomy and usury led him to deconstruct Aristotle’s binary opposition between “custom” (nomos) and “nature” (phusis) and thus to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of philosophy.