Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The politics of virtue in Augustan England
- 3 A religious politics of virtue: Low Church Anglicanism and the Societies for Reformation of Manners
- 4 A republican politics of virtue: The selfish citizen in Cato's Letters
- 5 Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
- 6 The Court Whig conception of civic virtue
- 7 A world without virtue: Mandeville's social and political thought
- 8 Virtue transformed
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Virtue transformed
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The politics of virtue in Augustan England
- 3 A religious politics of virtue: Low Church Anglicanism and the Societies for Reformation of Manners
- 4 A republican politics of virtue: The selfish citizen in Cato's Letters
- 5 Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
- 6 The Court Whig conception of civic virtue
- 7 A world without virtue: Mandeville's social and political thought
- 8 Virtue transformed
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virtue TransformedPolitical Argument in England, 1688–1740, pp. 150 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992