Editing Jeremy Bentham's Selected Economic Writings: Boundaries and Methodological Issues

This article deals with a French edition of Jeremy Bentham’s Selected Economic Writings. It aims at explaining the editorial choices that will be made, and underlining the difficulties faced by such an edition. Two kinds of difficulties are stressed: on the one hand, the singularity of Bentham’s conception of political economy implies questioning the status of this science in his utilitarianism (section I – Question of boundaries); on the other hand, I raise some more general methodological issues which confront each editor of texts from the past (Section II – Methodological Issues).