Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E.Kerry and Matthew S.Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.

Abstract

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.Benjamin Franklin 's Intellectual World is the latest contribution to the ever-growing scholarly interest in Franklin's life and works. Recent biographies such as Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An Life (2003), Gordon Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and H.W. Brand's The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000) have contributed to the resurgence of interest in Franklin. Both the shadow of these recent biographies and the ensuing debates hang over Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World.The impetus for this collection was a 2007 conference held at the University of Cambridge celebrating the tercentenary of Franklin's birth. The co-editors of the collection, Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, find the conference location in the United Kingdom fitting for Franklin, who was the first as much as he was, for most of life, a loyal British subject. The collection attempts to bring together political thought and intellectual history in order to connect American and European ideas (ix). Some of the most novel explorations of Franklin's legacy in this volume focus on the exchange between the New World and Europe, an important concentration for a transatlantic figure like Franklin. Jurgen Overhoff's fascinating essay focuses on Franklin's often-overlooked trip to Germany in 1766. Overhoff argues that Franklin's visit and study of the Roman Empire was essential to conception of federalism, which went into own Articles of Federation and Perpetual Union of the United Colonies of North America (84). Scholarship on Federalism has often emphasized the example of the Iroquois Confederacy as being the preeminent model for colonists, but Overhoff convincingly argues that the Holy Roman moment may be just as important to early federalism (84).Another interesting transatlantic connection comes in Paul E. Kerry's essay on Franklin's influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While Goethe and Franklin never met or corresponded, they had a great deal in common, as both held experiments, were involved in sute affairs, and helped to support or found civic institutions such as libraries and universities. However, Kerry's emphasis is that Goethe used Franklin's biography, which he read in 1810 prior to writing own autobiography, Poetry and Truth, in 1813-1814, as a model for his own self-fashioning and achievements, scientific and literary (155). …