Introduction

Summary

Benjamin Franklin the philosopher and lawgiver is the subject of this study. The 1759 Wilson portrait, featured on the cover of this book, shows a stern, confident, and resolute Franklin, who was by that time a courageous soldier, defiant Whig, terror to proprietary privilege, and philosopher of nature and man. He wrote brilliant, terse responses to the great minds of the time—Clarke, Locke, Collins, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson— for his own edification. He was certainly one for disputation; but it became enough for him just to know. And he would come to learn that he could only know himself by observing his interactions with others. Franklin's rational investigations of moral philosophy were tethered by his affections, not just engaging in ale-infused philosophical conversations with friends at the Junto, but standing shoulder to shoulder against the blast of house fires, taking his turn at the wall as a common soldier, and volunteering his pen to fight for the liberties of Pennsylvanians against the proprietors, and eventually the Crown. “Pensilvania is my Darling,” he wrote in 1755, not long after he instructed his readers, “Still be your darling [the] Study [of] Nature's Laws; / And to its Fountain trace up every Cause.” But how did politics and philosophy fit together in the mind of Franklin? What makes his autobiographical conversion so interesting is that the two did not always go together. As a youth in Boston, Franklin was persuaded that public-spiritedness was for suckers, and yet we find him three years later returning from cosmopolitan London society to the provinces.

To solve this riddle one must first locate Franklin's dispersed writings, often anonymous, seldom systematic in the usual sense, and an ongoing subject of scholarly investigation. It means, second, one must grapple with his writing style. Franklin was an Enlightenment philosopher, and he wrote like one, which is to say, with irony. As a youth, like John Wise, Shaftesbury, and Addison, he jabbed at the religious and political authorities with insinuation, innuendo, and burlesque, and he would surpass his favorite writers in his fame. But ideas are fruitless if not shared—thus Franklin always left behind a trace of his meaning, or a clause that undermines a lengthy argument.