La non-distopia di Jeremy Bentham. Il Panopticon tra utilitarismo e riformismo

Between 1786 and 1791 Jeremy Bentham conceived and complete the drafting of the Panopticon. It is a proposal of prison's reform to which he will work for twenty years, both introducing changes and clarifications to the original text, and trying to give it concrete implementation. Despite the intellectual and economic efforts made by the philosopher for the construction of the prison, and although it is one of the few texts he published, the Panopticon was mostly overlooked by critics and, among those who have dealt with it, there were who have considered it as a theoretical exercise, and many were those who have reduced it to a utopian model and, most often, as an inhuman tool, and tracked in it an example of dystopia. A crucial role in this regard has played the reading proposed by Foucault in Surveiller et punir (1975) in which the Panopticon is presented as the paradigm of society conceived by Bentham, a society dominated by a disciplinary power. These interpretations are the result of a misunderstanding of the Bentham's work produced by its contextualization both as compared to the historical period and the particular socio-economic conditions in which it was conceived, and as to a greater and more decisive consequences with respect to the philosophical system of which it flows. The Panopticon is proof positive of the reformatory spirit of its author and it is conceived by him as a powerful tool for the realization of the "artificial harmony" between individual interest and collective interest that is the basic problem of the English philosopher's whole political-legal project. Starting from the centrality that the criminal dimension occupies within the Bentham's philosophical and reformatory system and from the priority that security takes on among the purposes of government, my research aims to offer a new reading of the text, that without consider it like a paradigm of each proposal promoted by Jeremy Bentham, both ethical and more specifically political, recognize it as a key moment in the development of utilitarian philosopher's thought: the practical outcome of a comprehensive theoretical work, much stranger both utopian horizon, and despite the dominant control, the dystopian prospect.