Robert Coram and the European Sources of Radical Enlightenment in America

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues for the indebtedness of the American Enlightenment to the European Enlightenment by examining the philosophy of Robert Coram, the revolutionary‐era radical philosopher of education. Coram criticised unequal distribution of land and argued for the compensatory influence of universal public education. He developed a primitivist critique of advanced civilisation, praising agricultural society and the American Indians. He presented an original, occasionally subversive, reading of various eighteenth‐century authors, such as William Blackstone, Antoine‐Yves Goguet, John Locke, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, in this way demonstrating the indebtedness of the American Enlightenment to the European Enlightenment.