Hobbes, Locke and the Consequences: Shaftesbury's Moral Sense and Political Agitation in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

This article examines the political (and Whig) agenda behind the earl of Shaftesbury's moral and religious thought, offering a reading of the so-called ‘moral sense’ that, based on Terry Eagleton's Marxist interpretation of moral-sense philosophy in general and Shaftesbury's use of the concept in particular, illuminates how far the moral sense serves a propagandistic purpose in Shaftesbury's writings. A close examination of this aspect, which has so far not been considered in the relevant literature on Shaftesbury, illuminates the anti-Hobbist and, by implication, anti-Tory (and High Church) tendency of his moral philosophy in the context of Low Church Anglicanism.