The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham is a series of volumes which, when complete, will form a definitive edition of the writings of the philosopher and reformerJeremy Bentham. It includes texts which Bentham published during his lifetime; and also the many texts which remained unpublished at his death, and which exist only in manuscript.
Scope and history
The Collected Works is intended to supersede the 11-volume The Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by Bentham's friend and literary executor, John Bowring, which is now considered to be flawed in many points of detail, and which omits Bentham's writings on religion; and also the 3-volume Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings edited by Werner Stark, which has likewise been subject to criticism. The series is being published under the auspices of the Bentham Project at University College London, whose library holds the majority of Bentham's surviving manuscripts. Since 2010 the Project has also run Transcribe Bentham, a project for transcribing Bentham's manuscripts through crowdsourcing, the output of which is intended, once edited, to appear in future Collected Works volumes. The Bentham Project is governed by the Bentham Committee, which was established in 1959. The first volume in the Collected Works appeared in 1968, and to date34 volumes have been published. The initial estimate was that the series would eventually run to approximately 38 volumes, but this figure has since risen to a projected total of 80. The series divides into two sequences: the Correspondence ; and the Works, i.e. writings which Bentham intended for publication, although many never progressed beyond drafts or outlines. The series was published from 1968 until 1981 by the Athlone Press, but since 1983 it has been published by Oxford University Press under its Clarendon Press imprint. The first five volumes of Correspondence, originally published by Athlone Press, were reissued with minor corrections in 2017 by UCL Press, both in hard copy and in open access electronic formats.
General Editors
The General Editors of the series have been: J. H. Burns ; J. R. Dinwiddy ; Fred Rosen ; Fred Rosen and Philip Schofield ; and Philip Schofield.
Published volumes
12 volumes of Correspondence, of an eventual 14, have so far been published; and 22 volumes of Works. The Works volumes are not sequentially numbered. Those volumes which have been published to date are as follows:
