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Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley's Scientific Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Isaac Kramnick
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Extract

In 1794 Joseph Priestley fled England and the church-and-king sentiment that had set ablaze his Birmingham house and laboratory in 1791. His flight to America was noted by the United Irishmen with a public letter. This most radical group in the entire camp of English sympathizers with the French Revolution not only lamented English repression but also offered a marvelous hymn to the tripartite linkage of America, useful science, and radical change.

The Emigration of Dr. Priestley will form a striking historical fact, by which alone future ages will learn to estimate truly the temper of the present times. … But be cheerful, dear Sir, you are going to a happier world, the world of Washington and Franklin. In idea we accompany you.… We also look to the new age when man shall become more precious than fine gold, and when his ambition shall be to subdue the elements, not to subjugate his fellow creatures, to make fire, water, earth, and air obey his bidding, but to leave the pure ethereal mind, as the sole thing in nature free and invincible…. The attention of a whole scientific people [here] is bent to multiplying the means and instruments of destruction … but you are going to a country where science is turned to better use.

The relationship between science and progressive politics was by no means one-way. Just as science would ameliorate the human condition, so a progressive politics would encourage scientific advances.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1986

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References

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3 Jefferson, Thomas to Priestley, Joseph, March 21, 1801. The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, P. L. (New York, 1905), 9:216Google Scholar. The Priestley-Jefferson connection is a close one. On numerous occasions Jefferson articulated the debt his own educational, theological, and political attitudes owed to Priestley's ideas and writings. He read Priestley's History of the Corruptions of Christianity (Birmingham. 1782)Google Scholar “over and over again,” and it became the basis for his own peculiar blend of anticlericalism and deism. Through Priestley, Jefferson came to philosophical materialism, the associationist theories of David Hartley, and notions of the materiality of the soul. Jefferson's millenarian vision of science and scientists is, at least in part, derived from Priestley's writings. The latter's writings on education were influential in Jefferson's planning of the University of Virginia, and Priestley's writings on the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and the separation of church and state were used in 1786 by Madison and Jefferson in planning the statute for establishing religious freedom in Virginia. But it was more than just specifics that Priestley and Jefferson shared. It was an entire worldview, an unabashed appreciation of modernity. Writing to Priestley in January 1800, Jefferson continued their running discussion on education. He agreed with Priestley that the study of Greek and Latin was not essential for a modern education. Jefferson then turned the letter to broader concerns in a passionate defense of modernity against antiquity. “The Gothic idea that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion, and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government, by whom it has been recommended, and whose purpose it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure” (Ford, ed., 9:102). These were Priestley's views, too. He had written earlier, “Those times of revived antiquity have had their use and are now no more…. Their maxims of life will not suit the world as it is at present” (Lectures on History and General Policy [London, 1782], lecture 45, p. 349)Google Scholar. For documentation of Jefferson's debt to Priestley, see Ford, ed., 9:95, 102, 380, 404; 10:69. See also The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Bergh, Albert E. (Washington, D.C., 1907), 10:228, 13:352, 14:200, 15:232Google Scholar; Koch, Adrienne, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Chicago, 1964), pp. 24, 27, 34Google Scholar; Boorstin, Daniel J., The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1960), pp. 17–19, 113–19, 159–62Google Scholar; Bonwick, Colin, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), p. 285Google Scholar; Han, Nicholas, “Franklin, Jefferson, and the English Radicals at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98 (1954): 406–26Google Scholar. For advice on commercial policy given Jefferson by Priestley and his disciple Thomas Cooper, see McCoy's, DrewThe Elusive Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), pp. 176–77, 215–16, 246–47Google Scholar.

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