Previous studies have pointed to the sense in which the Benthams, both Jeremy, the English philosopher, and his brother, Samuel, placed a high value upon and gave some significance to accounting in their work. In this paper and in one to be published in a subsequent issue of this journal (Gallhofer and Haslam, forthcoming: b), we conduct an analysis of the Benthams’ ‘accounting texts’. In this first paper, we especially consider the sense in which the Benthams’ conception of accounting is suggestive of an accounting which may be understood to have detrimental or ‘negative’ social consequences.