Hot take: Bentham is seriously underrated by libertarians.

Part of the problem is that economists don’t read history, and philosophers who do know Bentham mainly by his terrible efforts at moral philosophy, and not by his brilliant work in legal reform.

A number of people know his “Defense of Usury,” which is of course pretty bad-ass. I mean, this is an essay that took *Adam Smith* to task for not being free-market enough. Ya gotta love that.

Fewer people know his “Not Paul, But Jesus,” in which he critiques asceticism and defends what he calls, in a phrase that gets my hedons flowing, “the eccentric pleasures of the bed.” https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1392179/3/npbj.pdf

But if you really want to appreciate Bentham’s positive influence on freedom of contract, the extension of property rights, and the substantive and procedural protection of individual liberty, I can’t recommend highly enough Dicey, Lecture IV Part 2: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/vandewetering-lectures-on-the-relation-between-law-and-public-opinion-lf-ed#lfDicey_label_148