The Politics of the Pure Language in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: Speech, Silence, and the Founding of Pennsylvania

This article revises a long-standing scholarly assumption that early Quaker language theory and practice attempted to reverse the effects of Babel or transcend language. Examining the writings of George Fox and seventeenth-century theorizations of the silent meeting, it argues that the Society of Friends practiced a silent attention to the “inner light” in order to generate a new kind of speech. Significantly, some Friends saw the primarily religious project of redeeming language as allowing for new political possibilities. When William Penn founded Pennsylvania, he attempted to apply Fox’s principles of the “pure language” to the political infrastructure, ideally creating a community based on linguistic transparency and free from state manipulation through language. Penn used the theory of the pure language to establish freedom of conscience as a central value in his commonwealth.