Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611477700 ISBN 13: 9781611477702

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This volume attempts to throw fresh light on two areas of Benjamin Franklin’s intellectual world, namely: his self-fashioning and his political thought. It is an odd thing that for all of Franklin’s voluminous writings—a fantastically well-documented correspondence over many years, scientific treatises that made his name amongst the brightest minds of Europe, newspaper articles, satires, and of course his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution—and yet scholars debate how to get at his political thought, indeed, if he had any political philosophy at all. It could be argued, that he is perhaps the American Founder most closely associated with the Enlightenment.

Similarly, for a man who left so much evidence about his life as a printer, bookseller, postmaster, inventor, diplomat, politician, scientist, among other professions, one who wrote an autobiography that has become a piece of American national literature and, indeed, a contribution to world culture, the question of who Ben Franklin continues to engage scholars and those who read about his life. His identity seems so stable that we associate it with certain virtues that apply to the way we live our lives, time management, for example. The image of the stable figure of Franklin is applied to create a sense of trust in everything from financial institutions to plumbers. His constant drive to improve and fashion himself reveal, however, a man whose identity was not static and fixed, but was focused on growth, on bettering his understanding of himself and the world he lived in and attempted to influence and improve.

About this title

About the Author

Paul E. Kerry is an associate professor of history and fellow of the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University. Matthew S. Holland is President of Utah Valley University.

Review

The collection of ten papers in Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World is a useful addition to the Franklin scholarship that has been accumulating in the early twenty-first century. It features several pieces that developed out of a conference hosted by the University of Cambridge at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, in March 2007. ... The ten papers in Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World bring to light a figure of inexhaustible richness and importance. (Journal of the Early Republic)

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World is a collection of excellent essays. (The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer)

Benjamin Franklin’s Intellectual World is an interesting and important contribution to Franklin scholarship. With its emphasis on transatlantic connections, this essay collection will be useful to scholars interested in reconnecting Franklin back to the British and European intellectual world. Furthermore, this collection attempts to further the conversation regarding the central debates and issues in Franklin scholarship. Benjamin Franklin’s Intellectual World is an important contribution to the ongoing legacy of recent work on one of our more elusive founding fathers. (Journal of American Culture)

This volume contributes to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to trace the contours of certain aspects of Franklin's intellectual world and argues in fresh ways that Franklin was a thinker of profound depth. Several of the essays in this volume explore how Franklin's political and philosophical thinking was informed, while examining the deep appeal that Franklin has had on generation after generation of Americans.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1611477700
• ISBN 13: 9781611477702
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196
• Editor: Kerry Paul E., Holland Matthew S.