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The 18th century > Publication of political literature > Major political writers > Shaftesbury and others

More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter's rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury's essays is characteristically idealistic, benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.

His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29), which includes The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn'd Honest (1705), takes a closer look at early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society's prosperous functioning. He thus favoured an altogether harsher view of man's natural instincts than Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.

He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age's irreligious tendencies and the obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man's knowledge of his creator.

In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the human mind's propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigour with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the spectator's or reader's delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious, socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith's masterpiece of laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was a friend of Hume's, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual life centred in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.

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