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From: Archimedes Plutonium on 25 Mar 2010 04:04


Archimedes Plutonium wrote:
> I am not pleased with the search results about Bentham's influence on
> the US
> Constitution and his influence on the Founding Fathers.
>
> I wonder if the Founding Fathers had Bentham's books when drafting the
> Constitution.
> I see where Bentham wrote one book in 1781, so that would have been
> ample
> time for the Founding Fathers to use the ideas in that book. I do not
> know when
> the first time that Bentham wrote out the principles and understanding
> of
> Utilitarianism? Was it well before 1787?
>
> I see in one biography of Bentham that he wrote up a mock sheet of the
> US
> Declaration of Independence. Of course, then, the Founding Fathers
> would
> obviously ignore Bentham, or pretend to ignore Bentham and
> utilitarianism,
> even though they would agree with utilitarianism and include it in the
> Constitution.
>
> And the Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Madison and Jay, since
> they were
> anonymous, would likely not attribute to Bentham ideas even if used.
>
> So I sense that perhaps what happened was that the Founding Fathers
> payed alot
> of attention to the ideas of Bentham and utilitarianism and
> incorporated those ideas
> into the USA Constitution, but because Bentham had attacked the
> Declaration of
> Independence earlier, that Bentham was never going to be recognized
> for his
> influences or contributions to the Constitution. Perhaps it can be
> said that the
> Preamble and the Bill of Rights are essentially words taken from the
> ideas of
> Bentham and that the Founding Fathers used Bentham more than they used
> anything else to form the Constitution.
>
> I wonder if anyone recorded what the libraries of Hamilton, Madison,
> Jay, Franklin
> contained and whether they all had and read Bentham. And because of
> Bentham's
> attack on the Decl of Independence the Founding Fathers, never refered
> to Bentham
> but used his ideas extensively.
>
> Archimedes Plutonium
> http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/
> whole entire Universe is just one big atom
> where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies
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