Jeremy Bentham and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms

In this paper¹ I want to examine and compare what seem, on the face of it at least, to be two very different doctrines: that enunciated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address given in 1941; and that contained in Jeremy Bentham’s discussion of natural rights in his Nonsense on Stilts, written in 1791 in response to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). Roosevelt’s speech has come to be known as the Speech of the Four Freedoms. Despite the pressures of the times, it looked forward to the future and set out