Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents     Acknowledgements   Preface Lady Joan Reid   Introduction “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …” Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland   Franklin’s Masks: A Play upon Possibility Michael Zuckerman   Benjamin Franklin Unmasked Jerry Weinberger   Early Modern Imperialism, Traditions of Liberalism, and Franklin’s Ends of Empire Carla Mulford   Benjamin Franklin, the Mysterious “Charles de Weissenstein,” and Britain’s Failure to Coax Revolutionary Americans Back into the Empire Neil L. York   Benjamin Franklin, Student of the Holy Roman Empire: His Summer Journey to Germany in 1766 and His Interest in the Empire’s Federal Constitution Jürgen Overhoff   Benjamin Franklin and the Leather Apron Men: the Politics of Class in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Simon P. Newman   Recasting Franklin as Printer: A Note on Recent Historiography Doug Thomas   Benjamin Franklin, Richard Price, and the Division of Sacred and Secular in the Age of Revolutions Benjamin E. Park   Ben Franklin and Socrates Lorraine Smith Pangle     From Weimar, with Love: Benjamin Franklin’s Influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Self-Fashioning Paul E. Kerry   Afterword Benjamin Franklin’s Material Presence in a Digital Age and Popular Culture World Roy E. Goodman   List of Contributors   Index