'A Picture of the Treasury': The Panopticon Penitentiary, Bureaucracy, and Autobiography in the Writings of Jeremy Bentham

哲学家兼改革家杰里米·边沁（1748-1832）设想了圆形监狱——一个能看到一切的地方——作为一个圆形建筑，它体现了“中央检查原则”，所有的活动都可以从一个中心位置进行监督。在《Panopticon》中，为了回应英国政府对监狱的需求，结束了运往美国的运输；边沁提议建造一座圆形监狱，在中央的视察塔上，监狱长可以看到关押在外围牢房里的所有囚犯。假设他们处于持续的监视之下，囚犯们将学会自律和热爱工作，经过改造，最终作为有用的公民获释。由于法国哲学家米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）将圆形监狱视为现代国家的典范，它已成为人文社会科学中最具标志性和争议性的符号之一。在福柯看来，圆形监狱是资本主义自由民主国家用来约束和制服人民的机制。圆形监狱的理念在建筑学、经济学、历史学、法学、管理学、哲学、政治学和心理学中引起了共鸣，并催生了一个全新的学科领域——监视研究。圆形监狱被记者和评论家用来比喻数字时代压迫性的、包罗万象的监视，并继续被证明是艺术家、音乐家和作家重新诠释的沃土。然而，这种巨大的学术、智力和创造性的努力，是基于对边沁著作的不充分和不完整的版本。福柯的工作和随后的学术研究依赖于不充分或部分版本的边沁的文本，而更重要的手稿材料从未以权威或可访问的形式提供。因此，这项研究的核心将是一个具有里程碑意义的资源：边沁的《国库图》的权威版本，用于广受好评的《边沁文集》，以及一系列解释性文章，以出版和开放的形式出版。《财政部的画像》将对未来的人文和社会科学研究做出持久的贡献，它首次出版了边沁自己对1798年至1802年间他与财政部和内政部官员为建造圆形监狱而进行的复杂而最终无果的谈判的亲密描述。当边沁意识到政府有意搁置圆形监狱的计划时，他怀疑官员们正在密谋破坏他的经济，甚至驱使他自杀，尽管议会批准了这一计划，并进行了数年的谈判、规划和公共资金支出。这项研究将首次以权威的形式将《忏悔录》与让-雅克·卢梭的《忏悔录》（1782）和约翰·斯图亚特·密尔的《自传》（1873）等著名作品进行比较。此外，《国库图》将对我们理解行政和立法之间的关系以及19世纪之交英国政府主要行政部门的内部运作做出重大贡献——因此，它构成了一个与查尔斯·狄更斯在《荒凉山庄》中那个绕圈的办公室相当的现实生活——并为关于自由国家的出现及其知识背景的成熟辩论增添了一个新的维度。

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the philosopher and reformer, conceived of the panopticon-the all-seeing place-as a circular building enshrining the 'central inspection principle', whereby all activities could be supervised from a central location. Responding to the British government's need for a penitentiary following the end of transportation to America, in 'Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House' (1791) Bentham proposed to build a panopticon prison, where the governor in a central inspection tower might view all the prisoners housed in the cells on the periphery. Assuming that they were under constant surveillance, the prisoners would learn self-discipline and love of work, be reformed, and eventually released as useful citizens.The panopticon has become one of the most iconic and controversial symbols in the humanities and social sciences as a result of French philosopher Michel Foucault's identification of it as a paradigm of the modern state. In Foucault's view, the panopticon enshrined the mechanisms employed by capitalist liberal democracies in order to discipline and subdue their populations. The idea of the panopticon has resonated in architecture, economics, history, law, management studies, philosophy, political science, and psychology, and has given rise to a whole new subject area-surveillance studies. The panopticon has been adopted by journalists and commentators as a metaphor for oppressive, all-encompassing surveillance in the digital age, and continues to prove fertile ground for reinterpretation by artists, musicians, and authors.This enormous scholarly, intellectual, and creative endeavour, has, however, been based on inadequate and incomplete editions of Bentham's writings. Foucault's work and the subsequent scholarship has relied on inadequate or partial versions of Bentham's texts, while further hugely important manuscript material has never before been made available in an authoritative or accessible format. Hence, the centrepiece of this research will be a landmark resource: an authoritative version of Bentham's 'A Picture of the Treasury' for the critically acclaimed edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, together with a collection of interpretive essays, in both published and open-access formats. 'A Picture of the Treasury' will constitute an enduring contribution to future research in the humanities and social sciences by publishing for the first time Bentham's own intimate account of his involved and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Treasury and Home Office officials between 1798 and 1802 to build the panopticon penitentiary. As Bentham came to realize that the government were minded to set aside the panopticon scheme, despite Parliamentary approval and several years of negotiations, planning, and expenditure of public money, he suspected that officials were conspiring either to ruin him financially or even drive him to suicide.The research will bring into the public domain for the first time, in authoritative form, a text that will bear comparison with such celebrated works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1782) and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873). 'A Picture of the Treasury', moreover, will contribute significantly to our understanding of the relationship between executive and legislature and to the inner workings of key administrative departments in the British government at the turn of the nineteenth century-and so constitute a real-life equivalent to Charles Dickens's circumlocution office in Bleak House-and add a new dimension to well-established debates concerning the emergence of the liberal state and its intellectual context.