Jeremy Bentham, regarded as the father of English utilitarianism, is not generally known as a polemicist. "He has devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths," William Hazlitt asserts in The Spirit of the Age (1825), "and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party politics." Bentham's stated opinions on rhetoric seem to support this view of him as the dispassionate framer of a new system of morals and legislation. In his "Essay on Language" he lists the vices of expression that threaten what in typically Benthamic terms he calls the "information-regarding" property of language, including irony and figurative language, and in The Rationale of Reward (1825) he condemns "the tribe of satirists," who "without other reward than the pleasure of humbling and disfiguring everything which does not please them, have constituted themselves reformers of mankind!" But in his long and frequently eccentric career...