SVARBESNIS UŽ KANTĄ IR HEGELĮ
MORE IMPORTANT THAN KANT AND HEGEL

Summary/Abstract: This article considers Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian project of social engineering through the prism of its critique by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Hodgskin. Surprisingly, Marx and Nietzsche, despite being thinkers of quite different types, despised Bentham for the same reasons (consensus sapientium): for his niggedly, boring style, for his philistinism and his British centrism. Hodgskin attacked Bentham for his denial of natural human rights and his intellectual hubris to dictate laws to the whole humankind. Despite this sharp and profound critique, it seems, that, as long as digital technology and globalization proceed, Bentham’s project of pannominion and panopticum is destined to be fulfilled as a kind of Americanized INGCOM. This is why Michel Foucault is right to claim that Bentham is more important to us than Kant and Hegel.

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