Jeremy Bentham and the Neoclassical and Neoliberal Traditions: Architect or Adversary?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reclaims Jeremy Bentham from the trend of characterizing him as an intellectual inspiration for neoclassicism and neoliberalism. It demonstrates that, although Bentham’s early thought subscribed to both ontological and methodological individualism, he later revised this perspective. In the early 19th century, Bentham developed a theory of ‘psychological dynamics’, asserting self-interest as a universal axiom. Individuals calculate their interests within historically situated power dynamics, influenced by their social location. This insight led Bentham to construct a theory of social ontology in which individual development was conceived as co-constitutive with social structures. Institutions were reconceptualized as vestiges of elite interests, necessitating radical constitutional reform. Thus, while Bentham’s early work provided a methodological framework later appropriated by neoclassicism and neoliberalism, his mature thought aligns more closely with the radical traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, making him the antithesis of the neoliberal worldview.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".