The
Collected Works is intended to supersede the 11-volume
The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1838–1843), edited by Bentham's friend and
literary executor,
John Bowring, which is now considered to be flawed in many points of detail, and which omits Bentham's writings on religion; and also the 3-volume ''Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings'' (1952–54) edited by
Werner Stark, which has likewise been subject to criticism. The series is being published under the auspices of the Bentham Project, based in the
Faculty of Laws at
University College London, whose library holds the majority of Bentham's surviving manuscripts. The Bentham Project currently consists of four members of staff: Professor Philip Schofield, the Director of the Project and General Editor of the
Collected Works, Dr Tim Causer, Dr Chris Riley, and Dr Peter Lythe. Since 2010 the Project has also run
Transcribe Bentham, a project for transcribing Bentham's manuscripts through
crowdsourcing, the output of which is intended, once edited, to appear in future
Collected Works volumes. The Bentham Project is governed by the Bentham Committee, which was established in 1959. The first volume in the
Collected Works appeared in 1968, and to date 35 volumes have been published. The initial estimate was that the series would eventually run to approximately 38 volumes, but this figure has since risen to a projected total of 80. The series divides into two sequences: the
Correspondence (including letters both to and from Bentham); and the
Works, i.e. writings which Bentham intended for publication, although many never progressed beyond drafts or outlines. The series was published from 1968 until 1981 by the
Athlone Press (once the
University of London's publishing house, now defunct). From 1983 ro 2019 it was published by
Oxford University Press under its Clarendon Press imprint. The first five volumes of
Correspondence, originally published by Athlone Press, were reissued with minor corrections in 2017 by
UCL Press, both in hard copy and in
open access electronic formats. Since the publication in February 2022 of the 35th volume in the edition,
Panopticon versus New South Wales, and Other Writings on Australia, the
Collected Works has been published by UCL Press, which makes available books in
hardback,
paperback, and open access PDF formats. ==General Editors==