Jeremy Bentham Bentham's auto-icon was on display in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Breuer location. Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its "fundamental axiom", "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong"". Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley, although the closest that Priestley in fact
Jeremy Bentham influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions. Bentham became convinced that his plans for the Panopticon had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite acting in their own interests. It was largely because of his brooding sense of injustice that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest" – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform. More successful was his cooperation with Patrick Colquhoun in tackling