An after dinner speech, 1979

Item No. 1.

James H. Burns

Speech Delivered at the Bentham Studies Conference Dinner, 9 July 1979

Professor James Henderson Burns was Emeritus Professor of the History of Political Thought at University College London and the first General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Burns’ contribution to Bentham studies and The Bentham Project were enormous but Burns, forever a modest man, played down his expertise. Part of the reason was his brilliance in medieval political thought and intellectual history, which made him one of the few leading scholars whose interests ranged from the medieval to the modern. Professor Burns’ papers were donated to the University of St Andrews in 2013 and contain volumes of unpublished research articles, teaching materials, undergraduate essays and correspondence. As an intellectual historian with singular range and as an always lucid writer, an item from the James H. Burns’ papers has been selected as the first item in our 1000 Manuscripts exhibit. The item is Burns’ speech on retiring as general editor of the Bentham Project. It contains a brief history of Bentham studies and advice for those who will follow him. More of Burns’s papers can be found in the J. H. Burns Collection in the Intellectual History Archive.