The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate (...) students, and independent scholars. Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T126964 Anonymous. By Benjamin Franklin. Only 100 copies printed. London: printed in the year, 1725. 32p.; 8°. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought was shaped by contacts with and knowledge of ancient aboriginal traditions. Indeed, a strong case can be made that key features of the social structure eventually outlined in the United States Constitution arose not from European sources, and not full-grown from the foreheads of European-American "founding fathers", but from aboriginal sources, communicated to the authors of the Constitution to a significant extent through Franklin. A brief sketch of the main argument to (...) this effect is offered in this essay. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin, the colonial American, maintained a now little-known interest in geological questions for more than sixty years. He began as a follower of English theorists, but soon assimilated some of their ideas with original speculations and discoveries, particularly regarding earthquakes. Though Franklin became famous for his experiments with electricity, he never attempted to explain earthquakes as if they were electrical phenomena; others, however, did. Through his access to American materials, Franklin contributed significantly to the work (...) of several English and French geological theorists. Though some of his own theories were ultimately of limited value, Franklin played an important role in the international science of his time. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was colonial America's foremost student of geology. (shrink)

Rousseau’s account of the “legislator” or “lawgiver” is commonly regarded as one of the most far-fetched, ominous, and baffling parts of his teaching in the Social Contract. In brief, Rousseau’s lawgiver seems to be a proto-totalitarian figure whose self-appointed mission is to found a political community by “denaturing” people at a single stroke and who may be a mere figment of Rousseau’s overheated imagination. Accordingly, this part of the Social Contract threatens to make a mockery of Rousseau’s claim to be (...) “taking men as they are and laws they can be,” as well as his claim that the combination of “ freedom and equality” is “the greatest good” in the civil state. Following and extending Rousseau’s own method of teaching by examples, however, this essay argues that Benjamin Franklin’s influence over the American republic—especially through his posthumous Autobiography—offers a prosaic example of the apparently fantastical phenomenon sketched by Rousseau. In fact, I argue that Franklin’s case corresponds more fully to Rousseau’s description than do any of Rousseau’s own examples (such as Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa) and that Franklin showed in practice what Rousseau suggested in theory: that a lawgiver can succeed without relying on coercion and without undercutting the equality that underlies a just society. Franklin’s denaturing influence, I suggest, has been crucial for the durability of republicanism in the United States, given the country’s size and diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 133-152 [Access article in PDF] Benjamin Franklin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of the Enlightenment Nancy Sinkoff * Figures In 1808 an anonymous Hebrew chapbook detailing a behaviorist guide to moral education and self-improvement appeared in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. Composed by Mendel Lefin of Satanów, an enlightened Polish Jew (maskil in the Hebrew terminology of (...) the period), Moral Accounting (Sefer Heshbon ha-Nefesh) was a crucial weapon in Lefin's lifelong literary war against Hasidism, the new Jewish pietistic movement which had captured the hearts and souls of much of eighteenth-century Polish Jewry. 1 The core of Moral Accounting was a boxed grid, seven lines by thirteen, which correlated, respectively, to the days of the week and to thirteen virtues in need of improvement. The grid was to be used daily throughout a thirteen-week cycle which repeated four times during the course of a year. Addressing a traditionally-educated Jewish audience, Mendel Lefin did not disclose the gentile source of the method of moral self-reform, but he did acknowledge that it was not his innovation: "Several years ago a new method was revealed, and it is [such] a wonderful invention for this [kind] of [moral] education that it seems that its renown will spread as quickly, if God desires it, as that of the invention of printing which brought light to the world." 2 [End Page 133] The creator of this "wonderful invention" was none other than Benjamin Franklin, whose "Rules of Conduct" first appeared in 1791 in the second part of his English Autobiography. 3There has been a noticeable interest recently among historians of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) to map carefully, region by region, the nuances and varieties of the Jewish encounter with modernity. 4 Nonetheless, Haskalah scholars have generally regarded Mendel Lefin's use of Franklin's technique as a confirmation of their view that the impetus for the Haskalah among East European Jewry lay in its exposure to the West in general and to the Berlin Haskalah's Western orientation in particular. 5 They have viewed Moral Accounting as merely a translation of yet another text of the European and American Enlightenments into Hebrew, and they have paid little attention to the Polish context and orientation of Lefin's work. 6 Implicit in this view, too, was the problematic assumption that translation of a text is an uncritical, acquiescent act. Mendel Lefin's wholesale adoption of Franklin's "Rules of Conduct," implied, first, a static, unidirectional influence of a Western text on an East European and, second, that Franklin's work itself had a fixed, absolute meaning which Lefin simply appended to his Hebrew book. Yet the appearance of the "Rules of Conduct" in Hebrew and [End Page 134] Lefin's use of other Western and non-Jewish texts were anything but mechanical. 7Not only Lefin's Jewishness but his Polish origins and Polish orientation make the assumption of passivity particularly acute. Effaced from the map of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, Poland's history has not been integrated into general historical treatments of the Enlightenment. 8 Just as studies of the Jewish Enlightenment describe a trajectory from Berlin to Austrian Galician to Russia, so do general interpretations of the European Enlightenment draw a line from Germany and France to Russia, bypassing Poland. For example, in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich's important book, The Enlightenment in National Context, Poland is nowhere to be found. 9 Yet Poland, too, had an Enlightenment (Oswiecenie), beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, which was stimulated by many of the same forces that spurred change in the West: the desire to reform antiquated political systems, to liberate education from religious dogma, and to create a rational state apparatus. In Poland the Enlightenment had its own national coloring; it was sponsored not by a rising bourgeois class but by royal and noble circles (and thus lacked the social critique of the Enlightenment in the... (shrink)

An interdisciplinary collection of comparative essays which look at aspects of the thought of Edwards and Franklin and consider their places in American culture.

This paper discusses aspects of the thought of the American patriot and thinker, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). At the present time, Franklin is too often regarded primarily as a scientific amateur whose tinkerings produced nothing of lasting importance, or as a self-centered prig of interest only to others like himself. In reality, Franklin was a thoughtful and concerned individual attempting to advance the common weal, both through his personal struggle toward moral perfection and through the institutionalization of (...) the scientific spirit of fallibilism, publicity, and the unquestioned appeal to experience as the sole means of deciding policies. I hope to suggest the ongoing value of Franklin's work in the course of my paper. (shrink)

'Omdat oudere vrouwen meer ervaring hebben, zijn ze verstandiger en beoefenen ze meer discretie bij het opzetten van een intrige om verdenking te voorkomen. De omgang met hen is derhalve veiliger voor je reputatie.'.

The most famous man of his age, Benjamin Franklin was an individual of many talents and accomplishments. He invented the wood-burning stove and the lightning rod, he wrote Poor Richard's Almanac and The Way to Wealth, and he traveled the world as a diplomat. But it was in politics that Franklin made his greatest impact. Franklin's political writings are full of fascinating reflections on human nature, on the character of good leadership, and on why government is (...) such a messy and problematic business. Drawing together threads in Franklin's writings, Lorraine Smith Pangle illuminates his thoughts on citizenship, federalism, constitutional government, the role of civil associations, and religious freedom. Of the American Founders, Franklin had an unrivaled understanding of the individual human soul. At the heart of his political vision is a view of democratic citizenship, a rich understanding of the qualities of the heart and mind necessary to support liberty and sustain happiness. This concise introduction reflects Franklin's valuable insight into political issues that continue to be relevant today. (shrink)