Earl Of Shaftesbury Research Articles

Persians, Politics and Politeness: Montesquieu Reads Shaftesbury

The influence of the philosophical theories of the Earl of Shaftesbury on Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721) was first postulated by Alessandro Crisafulli. Drawing his evidence principally from ideas expressed in the fable of the Troglodytes (letters 11-14), Crisafulli argued that Shaftesbury's philosophical writings, published collectively in 1711 under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, contained noticeable parallels with Montesquieu's first published work. l Despite their age, Crisafulli's articles constitute the only sustained discussion of this subject. Indeed, while the Lettres persanes have been the subject of renewed critical attention in recent years, the influence of English thought and writing on this text largely remains unexplored. This is partly due to the fact that Montesquieu's access to English sources before his visit to England in 1729-31 remains a subject of dispute. Crisafulli himself sidesteps the issue, remarking that whilst only excerpts from Shaftesbury's work had been translated into French before the Lettres persanes appeared, it was 'more than probable' that Montesquieu was 'acquainted' with his writings.4 In fact, the catalogue of Montesquieu's library at La Brede reveals that the author owned an English edition of the Characteristics published in 1714, though its date of acquisition is unclear.s Paul Vemiere has moreover questioned Montesquieu's ability to read and understand English at the time the Lettres persanes were written,6 thus seemingly casting doubt on the claim that the author could then have been familiar with Shaftesbury's work. Since Crisafulli's articles first appeared, however, studies of early modem print culture and the eighteenth-century public sphere have encouraged scholars of the Enlightenment to look at questions of influence, reception and the circulation and diffusion of ideas in a new light. In particular, the role of the periodical press in

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Romantic Hellenism, sculpture and Rome

Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries: The Apollo & the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakespear...

Thomas Stringer, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Edward Clarke


 
 
 Two things changed Thomas Stringer’s career as an unremarkable lawyer and steward to a country gentleman; first, the ambition of his master, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who became Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672 and was one of the great statesmen of the age, and secondly that he became a close friend and correspondent of John Locke. As a result Stringer was at the centre of significant events, involved in Colonial Trade and Prince Rupert’s Great Gunnes, quarrelling with Locke over his portrait and having a life- long family friendship with Edward Clarke MP, whose children were the subject of Locke’s book Some Thoughts Concerning Education. This article, based on the Shaftesbury papers in the Hampshire Record Office and Clarke’s papers in the Somerset Record Office, will shed light on Stringer’s life and his acquisition of some political importance in the Exclusion crisis, as it is claimed that he drafted the Exclusion Bill; and also on some of Locke’s activities.
 
 

REVIEWS

REVIEWS

Foolish knowledge: the commercial modernity of the periodical press

This article adds to critics’ growing interest in Romantic periodicals by focusing on weekly periodicals’ role as “the Historian of character and manners.” If the monthly reviews and magazines boasted of their panoptic survey of the whole of recent literary production, the single‐essay periodicals defined their importance by embracing what was in many ways the opposite perspective. Preoccupied with the resonant power of local truths, they gravitated towards a style which functioned as a microcosm of a larger order that could only ever be delineated through fragments rather than through any more encompassing structural analysis. If their fragmentary style left weekly periodical writers vulnerable to the charge of contributing to the age’s cultural decline by satisfying readers with a stream of brief and highly conversational essays, they countered this objection by insisting that their disconnected form fostered an active process of critical engagement by training readers to participate in what Samuel Johnson called the “miscellaneous and unconnected” nature of a modern commercial society. In doing so they helped to translate the discourse of polite sociability into a basis of cultural authority which reflected the domain of middle‐class life at the expense of the aristocratic connotations that critics such as the Earl of Shaftesbury had associated with it.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

Shaftesbury on the ‘Natural Secretion’ and Philosophical Personae

The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) devoted a great deal of effort, both theoretical and practical, to improving and controlling his personae, whether philosophical, literary or social. Far f...

Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Shaftesbury Family


 
 
 Among the Malmesbury family papers in the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, there exists a letter written by Pierre Coste to James Harris that throws new light both on Coste’s relations with John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and on some events in the life of the first Earl of Shaftesbury.
 
 

In and after the beginning: inaugural moments and literary institutions in the long eighteenth century

Introduction 1. Congregating a Future: John Bunyan, Accumulating Aphorisms, and More-than-Modern Science 2. In Search of an Empirical System: Locke, Mandeville, and the Mock-Heroic Enhancement of Experience 3. Islands, Clubs, and Constellations: Daniel Defoe and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury 4. The Beginnings of Novelty: Henry Fielding, TobiaS Smollett, Bishop George Berkeley, and the Neo-Picaresque 5. Toward an Environmental Mode: Letting Nature Take Its Authorial Course in Richardson, Mackenzie, Burney, and Cowper.

Religion and Gender in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris

Religion and Gender in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris Isabelle Torrance (bio) The second half of the eighteenth century saw a new impetus in the relationship between Europeans and classical literature. There was a clear move away from what had become perceived as artificial forms of expression based on baroque notions of proper restraint. Preoccupations with history and prose inspired by classical models gave way to a renewed interest in the more emotional genres of art, philosophy, and poetry. The new emphasis was on gaining a deeper understanding of classical models, and this contributed to the success of classically inspired works from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Highet (1985, 355) goes so far as to say that "most of the European writers of the epoch 1765–1825 knew much more about classical literature than their predecessors, and were more successful in capturing and reproducing its meaning." He remarks that Goethe, for example, "knew more Greek than Klopstock" (Highet 1985, 355). But, of course, the attempt at deeper understanding was nevertheless colored by contemporary subjectivities. When the mostly self-taught cobbler's son J. J. Winckelmann began publishing on Greek art and literature in the mid-eighteenth century, he captured the imaginations of many influential Germans of the period, including Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Humboldt. The classical ideal of Greece was to prove an important inspiration for all these in their writings. Although clearly influenced by the work of men like the Earl of Shaftesbury in England, the publications of Winckelmann are commonly seen as marking the beginning of a new preoccupation with Greece in German thinkers at that time.1 Winckelmann was primarily concerned with the visual arts, especially sculpture, and he propounded the association of Greece with nature, beauty, and freedom while the contemporary baroque world was shown as unnatural and corrupt. This subjective understanding of Greece is clear in Goethe's Iphigenie. The title character is cast as a pure and moral soul, who can claim that she is "as free as a man" (see below). It is noteworthy also that one of Goethe's sleights of hand in adapting the Euripidean original is to dispense with the statue of [End Page 177] Artemis, which Orestes must retrieve from the land in order to be rid of the Furies. In Goethe, Apollo gives the ambiguous oracle to rescue "the sister," which Goethe's "Orest" belatedly understands as meaning his own sister rather than Apollo's. Thus, the statue of Artemis in Euripides has become, in Goethe, the statuesque Iphigenie, a living, breathing, classical ideal of a statue.2 In a similar vein, the slogan quoted by E. M. Butler in the context of Goethe as disciple of Rousseau "Back to nature; back to the noble savage!" (Butler 1935, 97) admirably suits Goethe's product Iphigenie, in which the "savage" king Thoas is described as "noble" in Iphigenie's prologue speech and is persuaded during the course of the play to abandon violence. In truth, the Iphigenie really marks the first completion of one of Goethe's forays into the adaptation of Greek literature, and one of the earliest classically inspired pieces from the German Renaissance.3 Goethe's engagement with Greek literature would become more and more apparent throughout his career. Before publishing the Iphigenie in prose form in 1779 (the verse form was published in 1787), he had already begun work on his Prometheus, though this was not published until 1830. Goethe found inspiration in mythical figures, particularly those from epic: Elpenor, Nausicaa, Achilles, Pandora, and Helen.4 Indeed, Goethe was fascinated by the ambiguous figure of Helen and the combination of her beauty with her propensity to disappear, evident in Euripides' Helen, a play whose plot structure is very similar indeed to his Iphigenia in Tauris. Helen will appear in Goethe's Faust II. Although the hero manages to conjure up Helen and marries her, she disappears, leaving him holding her empty veil.5 In 1818, in his essay Antik und Modern, Goethe wrote "Jeder sei auf seiner Art eine Grieche! Aber sei's!" (Everyone should be a Greek in his own way! But he should be a Greek nonetheless!).6 This statement...

The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth- Century Britain: "Well-Grounded" Exemplarity vs. "Romantic" Exceptionality

INTRODUCTION Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes, on August 10, 1758, was a product of the ascendancy of ideas in mid-eighteenthcentury British culture. (1) There is, however, a richer, more complex story which remains to be told about the relationship between sentimentality and the Magdalen House. The adjective with reference to eighteenth-century cultural discourse, does not designate a single coherent literary or philosophical tradition, but a complex, evolving, and frequently contradictory set of discourses. To characterize the evolution of these ideas most starkly, at the start of the century sentimental is applied to the cultural productions associated with the Moral Sense philosophy of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. (2) here designates a Whiggish optimism about the role of the senses in the improvement and refinement of modern social manners, morals, and tastes. By the last three decades of the eighteenth century, however, the adjective sentimental designates predominantly a literature which has turned its back on the modern world. Sentimental literature of the late century is more insistent than its forebear on the native goodness of the human senses and particularly the heart, but here this goodness is no longer seen with any conviction as a tool for the improvement or refinement of society as a whole. Instead the native goodness of the heart is shown to be contaminated, exploited, or abused when it comes into contact with the world. My contention in this essay is first that the founding of the Magdalen Hospital should be read as the cultural high-water mark of the earlier sentimental, Whiggish discourse of improvement. It was a moment at which the merchants and bankers who dreamt up the institution discovered, in their embrace of this discourse, the authority to assert a truce between virtue and commerce. They discovered the authority to assert, in the face of traditional Christian theology and classical models of political economy, that desire was not utterly incompatible with cultural probity. As I will argue later in this essay, the extraordinary popularity of the Magdalen Hospital throughout the 1760s and 1770s was material testimony to the authority of the Whiggish discourse and its power to reassure the public that even the most destructive of commercial appetites were really only the result of misunderstanding and miseducation. My second contention in this essay is that the Magdalen Hospital would prove to be a limit-case of Whiggish sentimentality. The Whiggish narrative which engendered the Magdalen Hospital can be traced back most immediately to the novels of the 1740s--to the romantic plots of fiction rather than to any observable social reality. Embrace of a narrative, whose provenance was literary, for the legitimation of a project of social reform, would foreground the ideological tensions that underpinned this Whiggish discourse. The Magdalen Hospital of the late 1750s and 1760s, I will argue, presaged and perhaps even precipitated the moment when the romantic, primitivist, and ultimately more pessimistic aspects of the discourse would cut adrift from their Whiggish moorings to be accepted as the new character of sentimentality. The hospital harbored the seeds of its own subsequent but brief decline in the 1780s and of its own ideological reformation later the same decade as a sanctimonious sweatshop. (3) This essay will chart the ideological origins and early history of the Magdalen Hospital in relation to this discursive sea change. SENTIMENT VS. MERCANTILISM: THE FOUNDING OF THE MAGDALEN HOSPITAL Although most of the institutional records for the Magdalen Hospital have now been lost, the history of its ideological foundations is still clearly visible. …

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. By Daniel Carey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 276p. $85.00. Daniel Carey rehabilitates a dispute among John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind” (p. 1). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in distinct ways respond to Locke's attack on innateness, the idea that “God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind” (p. 51). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson do so by evoking a “Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation” (p. 200).

"Give Me Not Poverty, Lest I Steal"

Give Me Poverty, Lest I Steal1The Judges sat Grave and Mute, gave me an easy [meaning 'indifferent'] Hearing, and Pronounc'd Sentence of Death, Moll Flanders recounts. Convicted of one of 200 offenses punishable by death, in her case stealing £46 of silk cloth-919 shillings more than one shilling threshold for felony theft-Daniel Defoe's heroine had tried to mitigate her sentence with speech that mov'd to Tears that heard [her].2 This confrontation between legal subject and human messinese of motives, emotions, and especially mental impairment is subject of Dana Rabin's Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rabin explains that legal system was equipped to deal with a coherent and cohesive punishable body, and with total, unmistakable, perfect insanity, not with pitiable human beings who insisted that temporary states of mind resulting from starvation, pain, passion, and suffering explained (and excused) their crimes, especially in age of sensibility.This important book tells story of law's confrontation with major change in larger culture: privileging of sensibility. The language of mind that accompanied this movement, Rabin argues, destabilized the definition and determination of mens rea, criminal intent, basis of all criminal law (8). Sensibility is no easy term to define, and major studies of it, including John Mullan's Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in Eighteenth Century (1988), Jerome McGann's The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (1996, which she does not cite), and especially G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992), have expanded our understanding of term, but also our awareness of its complicated and complicating impact on every facet of British life. Rabin, following Barker-Benfield, defines it as component of identity and faculty of susceptibility to one's own feelings and feelings of others (11). She usefully summarizes opinions about human nature and proliferation of theories of self and moral sense by, among others, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and then weaves together legal, social, and cultural history to tell story of juries, judges, and legal theorists grappling with new demand that they possess sensibility.The story begins and ends with James Hadfield, former soldier and silversmith who shot George III in crowded theatre. After brilliant defense by Thomas Erskine, he was found Not guilty; he being under influence of insanity act was (1). Before reading this book, phrase at time slides by unnoticed; after reading it, words glow with significance. Rabin slowly develops context in which this verdict was rendered in four chapters. After introductory one, chapter 2 clearly explains mechanics of eighteenth-century trials and major changes in century, such as evolution of lawyerized courtroom from accused speaks trial that Moll Flanders portrays. It introduces types of insanity pleas and summarizes pertinent legal opinions of such major figures as Matthew Hale, author of The History of Pleas of Crown, and William Blackstone, who wrote Commentaries on Laws of England. Chapter 3 turns to moral philosophy, history of conceptions of self, and ideas of self and responsibility that were circulating in popular literature. Rabin works with pleas involving clouded judgment, such as drunkenness and necessity, and briefly with several novels, including Moll Flanders and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Chapter 4 uses cases of infanticide committed by unmarried women to widen discussion of influence of sensibility and sources of opinion to those of trial judges and juries. …

Fashion as Art; is Fashion Art?

The question whether fashion can be regarded as a form of art begs the question of what kinds of things can legitimately be thus regarded.<brp>In the first section, some of the most recent contributions to dealing with this issue are critically analyzed. The conclusion that emerges is that—like art—clothes can provide the subject of historical research. The second section deals with the aesthetics of clothes. If sartorial fashion can be a form of art then we need an aesthetics of fashion. Whilst it would be difficult to contest the artistic quality of clothes throughout the centuries, fashion—like architecture—fulfills primarily a functional dimension. Some of the key concepts pertaining to classical aesthetics, such as taste in the writings of Edmund Burke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Immanuel Kant with special reference to Kant's less well-known writings on anthropology under which he classified fashion, are discussed. Some of the more recent contributions such as Curt J. Ducasse's brilliant 1944 article “The Art of Personal Beauty” are also discussed in this section. Finally, Karen Hanson in her article “Dressing Up, Dressing Down: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion” addresses this important issue, arguing that—like dance perhaps—fashion has systematically been disregarded by philosophers as a worthy subject of research. Like so many articles in Fashion Theory, this article is an attempt to redress this balance by seeking new ways of providing a serious theoretical and aesthetic basis for the study of sartorial fashion.

Moral Rationalism vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

AbstractOne of the most significant disputes in early modern philosophy was between the moral rationalists and the moral sentimentalists. The moral rationalists – such as Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and John Balguy – held that morality originated in reason alone. The moral sentimentalists – such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume – held that morality originated at least partly in sentiment. In addition to other arguments, the rationalists and sentimentalists developed rich analogies. The most significant analogy the rationalists developed was between morality and mathematics. The most significant analogy the sentimentalists developed was between morality and beauty. These two analogies illustrate well the main ideas, underlying insights, and accounts of moral phenomenology the two positions have to offer. An examination of the two analogies will thus serve as a useful introduction to the debate between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism as a whole.

Hardy, Shaftesbury, and Aesthetic Education

This essay traces the influence of Victorian debates about aesthetic education in Thomas Hardy's 1890 short story "Barbara of the House of Grebe." Hardy's story, loosely based on an anecdote about the grandson of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, concerns the uses of art for the education of character. Against the claims for moral transformation made by Victorian educational reformers such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, Hardy suggests that art can easily become a tool for subordinating students rather than a means of fashioning free and autonomous individuals.

The Politics of Handel's Early London Operas, 1711–1718

Athough aristocratic Whigs were the primary supporters of opera during the last years of Queen Anne's reign, Whig publicists launched a series of attacks against Italian opera that revealed social and ideological tensions within the party. The Earl of Shaftesbury, an ardent Whig, gave intellectual weight to the Whig aristocratic taste for opera, but proponents of the popular theater remained unconvinced that this foreign art form could be reconciled with Whig principles. Handel's operas reflected, as well as responded to, these debates.

The Use of the Senses: Sensation, Danger and New Protagonists of Taste in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain

From the mid-1740's the critical domain of taste, traditionally the preserve of a discerning ruling elite, became crowded with new entrants. These commentators, including Joseph Spence and John Gilbert Cooper, privileged individual judgement and sensory observation above notions of the public good. Several educated urbanites objected to this trend and began to alert the public to its potentially threatening impact. This article addresses that body of writing, including the recently attributed Hercules and Cadmus in George Lyttleton's Dialogues of the Dead (London, 1760), which was written by Elizabeth Montague, Allan Ramsay's Dialogue on Taste (London, 1757) and Frances Reynolds's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origins of Our Ideas of Beauty (London, 1785). Drawing from the writings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, I argue, Reynolds and her contemporaries hoped to seek solutions to the problems created by Britain's changing social consensus.

The Transition of English Aesthetic Sense in the Eighteenth Century (1) :To Anthony Ashely Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury

The Transition of English Aesthetic Sense in the Eighteenth Century (1) :To Anthony Ashely Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury