In ‘Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author’, the third essay in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711, 1714), Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, speculates on the ‘two widely different roads’ available to ‘our ingenious and noble youths’. They may pursue ‘pedantry or school learning, which lies amid the dregs and most corrupt part of ancient literature’, or they may follow ‘the fashionable illiterate world, which aims merely at the character of the fine gentleman and takes up with the foppery of modern languages and foreign wit’. Shaftesbury's concern here is not only education, but also the practice of philosophy and the conditions of the Characteristics ’ writing and reception. While it's far from obvious from this passage, academic philosophy and ‘the fashionable … world’ represent the two pre-eminent norms of Shaftesbury's thought. Here and throughout the Characteristics, these ‘two widely different roads’ are contrary extremes, and – to a degree that has been underappreciated in critical commentary – Shaftesbury finds little firm ground between them: ‘The sprightly arts and sciences are severed from philosophy, which consequently must grow dronish, insipid, pedantic, useless and directly opposite to the real knowledge and practice of the world and mankind’.

Shaftesbury hoped to extricate philosophy from the cloistered confines of the school and the church, and to cure it of the dogmatism and pedantry he associated with those institutions. Having been ‘immured … in colleges’, ‘banished … in distant cloisters and unpracticed cells’, philosophy needed to be ‘brought upon the public stage’, to be relocated, as Lawrence Klein suggests, from ‘solitary … environments to worldly and sociable ones’. In making philosophy sociable, Shaftesbury made it answer to the discursive imperatives of ‘politeness’, subjecting solitary modes of knowing to the dialogic play of sociable conversation. However, polite sociability serves Shaftesbury not so much as a substitute for customary philosophical contexts and practices as a corrective – which, in its turn, needs correcting. In ‘good company’ Shaftesbury complains, learning is dismissed as pedantry, and any discussion of morality is seen as tantamount to preaching. ‘The strain of modern politeness’ is generally shallow, hyperbolic, insincere and obsequious – oft en indistinguishable from flattery or manipulation.