In 1711, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), brought out an anthology of his previously published works. He had revised them and supplemented them with new writing, and he called the collection Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. In its optimistic assessment of an orderly cosmos, confidence in human sociability and fellow feeling, harmonization of ethical and aesthetic experience, emphases on liberty and toleration, and commitment to the role of philosophy in educating humanity, Characteristics found readers throughout the eighteenth century, in Britain and on the Continent.

Shaftesbury did not explain why he chose the particular title he gave to the collection, but the title does convey the fact that the work was diverse in its contents and, also, often concrete and topical in approach. It is hardly surprising that Characteristics has been of interest to a wide range of modern scholars. The text has been read to illuminate the histories of religion and irreligion, ethics and aesthetics, political discourse, painting, architecture, gardening, literature, scholarship and, most recently, gender – not to mention such big themes in the interpretation of the eighteenth century as the civilizing process, the Enlightenment, the public sphere and sensibility. Characteristics is indeed a fundamental work for understanding the intellectual and cultural aspirations and achievements of the eighteenth century (and, in some respects, of a period extending deep into the nineteenth century).