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8 - Virtue transformed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2009

Shelley Burtt
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

One can set no precise date at which the importance of a politics of public virtue was first questioned or last appreciated in English political thought. Still, the first half of the eighteenth century in England marks a particularly significant moment in society's perennial political engagement with the question of virtue. For at this time, an enthusiastic revival of the politics of public virtue (prompted by the triumph of 1688 and the transformation of political culture that followed from it) coincided with the emergence of features of the modern state that have often been held to make the practice of civic virtue more difficult if not impossible. We know from seventeenthcentury history (the failed puritan and republican initiatives of the Civil War and interregnum) that the politics of public virtue did not fare so well prior to the Augustan age. But what were its fortunes at this, the dawn of the modern era? The short answer is equally poor. Not only did the various advocates of public virtue fail to secure governmental support for their understandings of the good citizen; their own political argument as well as that of their opponents transformed the public debate about the nature and necessity of political virtue.

There existed at the end of the seventeenth century a virtually unanimous consensus that public virtue of some sort was necessary to ground the good state. Both religious and political teachings reinforced the idea that good citizens must be loyal lovers of their country, willing and able to set aside their personal desires to advance the public good.

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Virtue Transformed
Political Argument in England, 1688–1740
, pp. 150 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1992

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  • Virtue transformed
  • Shelley Burtt, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Virtue Transformed
  • Online publication: 24 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527951.008
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  • Virtue transformed
  • Shelley Burtt, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Virtue Transformed
  • Online publication: 24 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527951.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Virtue transformed
  • Shelley Burtt, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Virtue Transformed
  • Online publication: 24 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527951.008
Available formats
×