Constitutional Code; for the Use of all Nations and all Governments professing Liberal Opinions.

Notes

First edition, all published, of Bentham's Constitutional Code, the only edition published in his lifetime. "The massive, unfinished Constitutional Code, the major work of his final decade, established Bentham as a major theorist of constitutional democracy" (F. Rosen & J. H. Burns, preface to the 1983 Clarendon Press edition, p. xliv). He drafted the Code, aptly subtitled "For the use of All Nations and All Governments professing Liberal Opinions", after receiving a concrete invitation to do so from the Portuguese Cortes, and hoped to see it adopted in Portugal, Greece, and several Latin American countries.
"The publication of the first volume of the Code and Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized was a relatively small affair. According to some financial accounts Bentham received from Robert Heward, the publisher, fifty copies of the Code were boarded and sewn in 1830 with three copies reported sold in 1830 and ten in 1831" (ibid.. p. xlii).