ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, THIRD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. Standard Edition: Complete Works, Correspondence, and Posthumous Writings, II,6: Askemata.

Abstract

In 1698, Anthony Ashley Cooper, grandson of the first Earl of Shaftesbury (Dryden’s Achitophel), was 27 years old, and suffering from nervous exhaustion. Three years earlier, he had been elected in the Whig interest as MP for Poole, but soon developed a ‘Convulsive Asthma’ that his doctor attributed to long evenings spent in the committee rooms. He was dividing his time already between politics and authorship. Earlier in 1698, he had edited a volume of homilies by the Latitudinarian divine Benjamin Whichote, with a preface in which he doubted the usefulness of sermons and demanded that philosophy be freed from the control of clerics and systematicians. He had also finished An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, a shortish, methodical treatise of philosophy in which he proposed the naturalness of social affections as the basis of a vision of moral autarky in a harmonious, stoic universe. But Shaftesbury could not get his inner life to correspond with the providential schemes set out in the Inquiry. In 1698, gripped by what seems to have been a major personal crisis, he declined to stand for re-election to parliament. Instead, he left England in August for a 7-month philosophical retreat at Rotterdam, the city (then home to his tutor John Locke) from which he had begun his grand tour of Europe a decade before.