Abstract

Shaftesbury’s “Irregular” Readers in Holland.Shaftesbury numbered among his friends and correspondents many dissidents and réfugiés whom he had met in Furly’s house in Rotterdam. These included Pierre Bayle, Jacques Basnage, van Limborch, Pierre Des Maizeaux, Pierre Coste and Jean Le Clerc. Dealing essentially with literary matters and comments on contemporary publishing ventures, the letters between the Englishman and the dissidents not only accompany the publication in French of some of Shaftesbury’s works and their reviews in the leading intellectual journals, but also contain important reflections on the relations between morals and politics. Readers, reviewers and translators of Shaftesbury’s works, dissidents and Huguenot réfugiés, not only fostered the circulation of his thought abroad but were interpreters of it and continued to be essential benchmarks in the eyes of the eighteenth-century philosophers, like Leibniz and Diderot.