The National Charity Company: Jeremy Bentham's Silent Revolution

At the end of 1795 Jeremy Bentham, the English Utilitarian philosopher and reformer, began to compose a far—reaching plan. He proposed to restructure the English Poor Law, a set of laws for the relief of poverty first codified under Queen Elizabeth. Bentham's plan was to dispense poor relief through a national network of workhouses (the National Charity Company) constructed on the basis of his famous Panopticon architectural principle and coordinated through a single centralized administrat...