A Proper Manner of Carrying on Controversies: Richard Price and the American Revolution

In the emerging spectrum of British "friendship to liberty" over the period 1773–78, it is possible to see the British political writer and philosopher Richard Price as either in the radical pro-American camp or among the more moderate "Friends of America." This essay locates the solution to Price's apparent inconsistency in an approach recently developed by historians of the 1790s, which suggests that we should not expect consistency from contemporaries responding to a train of events and with a range of interlocutors. It argues that Price was at core a radical pro-American, but that his closeness to the Earl of Shelburne, the trajectory of the Anglo-American crisis during the 1770s, and Price's own temperamental dislike of ruptures of friendship combined to suggest a greater apparent sympathy with moderate pro-Americanism before the death of the Earl of Chatham in 1778.