The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin

NOTES

NOTES Regarding sources for writings by Franklin, please see the Note on Sources at the front of this book. Introduction 1. Franklin to Jane Mecom, 24 December 1767; cf. Franklin to an unnamed recipient, 28 November 1768. 2. The critic who goes the furthest in denying to Franklin any coherent philosophy is Charles AngoV, who writes, “Franklin was very good in organizing post oYces and fire departments, but he was completely lost when it came to drafting organic bodies of laws. Basic philosophic ideas were beyond him. . . . Abstract ideas, save those of the corner grocery store, somehow irked him.” AngoV, who despises Franklin for “making a religion of Babbitry,” charges that even his electrical experiments were vastly overrated and that in all respects he was a mediocrity: A Literary History of the American People, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931) 2:295–310. A similar assessment is given by one of the major editors of Franklin’s collected works, Albert Henry Smyth, who writes, “Franklin’s mind was attentive to trifles; his philosophy never got beyond the homely maxims of worldly prudence”: American Literature (Philadelphia: Eldredge and Brothers, 1889), 20. Even the more moderate Michael Zuckerman charges that there is no center at all to Franklin’s thought, that he “never found a unifying frame for his career ,” was “always prepared to proceed in spite of principle,” and “experimented playfully” with all his “beliefs and values”: “Doing Good While Doing Well: Benevolence and Self-Interest in Franklin’s Autobiography ,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Reappraising Benjamin Franklin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 448–49. David Levin, in contrast, writes, “The particular form of Franklin’s wit, his decision to portray himself as an inquisitive empiricist, the very success of his eVort to exemplify moral values in accounts of practical experience, his doctrine of enlightened self-interest, and the fine simplicity of his exposition —all these combine to make him seem philosophically more naïve, and practically more materialistic, than he is”: “Franklin: Experimenter in Life and Art,” in Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., Benjamin Franklin: Statesman225 Philosopher or Materialist? (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1972), 61. A Franklin biographer, Carl Becker, goes further and argues that Franklin was among the greatest philosophers of his age: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 21–22. At the other extreme from AngoV is Paul W. Conner, who argues that Franklin’s whole political thought is reducible to a “grand design” for a “New American Order”: Poor Richard ’s Politicks: Franklin and the New American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), x, xi; cf. 14, 96. 3. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Leonard Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 157–58. 4. Ibid., 44. 5. “Silence Dogood,” no. 1, 2 April 1722. 6. Ibid., no. 2, 16 April 1722. 7. Ralph Lerner nicely brings out the centrality of the theme of humanity ’s mixed motives in The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 48. 8. “Silence Dogood,” no. 8, 9 July 1722, reprinting Cato’s Letters, no. 38, from The London Journal, no. 80, 4 February 1721. 9. “Silence Dogood,” no. 2, 16 April 1722. 10. Ibid., no. 9, 23 July 1722. H. W. Brands points out that the immediate provocation for this attack was probably the oppressive censorship that Franklin’s brother and his newspaper were then suVering from the Massachusetts colonial government, backed up by the Puritan establishment : The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Random House, 2000), 30. 11. See esp. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Book 2, Chapter 2. 12. As Ormond Seavey writes in an unusually perceptive essay on Franklin and his quiet way of undercutting traditional authority, “Somehow nothing the late Reverend Dogood could say of an improving nature will escape being colored, in the reader’s mind, by a recollection of this mortifying scene”: “Benjamin Franklin and D. H. Lawrence as Conflicting Modes of Consciousness,” in Melvin H. Buxbaum , ed., Critical Essays on Benjamin Franklin (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 64. 13. “Silence Dogood,” no. 10, 13 August 1722. 14. Ibid., no. 11, 20 August 1722. 15. Ralph Waldo Emerson remarks that Franklin’s “serene and powerful understanding . . . seemed to be a transmigration of the Genius of Notes to Pages 3–12 226 [3.149...