Remember Richard Price!

[Celerity]

Demonised by the political establishment for his radical, dissenting views, this 18th-century Welsh polymath deserves better

https://aeon.co/essays/remembering-the-18th-century-radical-dissenter-richard-price

The year 2023 marks the tercentenary of the birth of the Welsh polymath Richard Price – dissenting minister, mathematician, moral philosopher, and author of influential tracts on the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Yet he is all but forgotten. This cultural amnesia is all the more striking when you consider that his obituary in 1791 predicted that this so-called ‘Liberty’s Apostle’ would be remembered alongside Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette and George Washington.

Price may be familiar to those with an interest in the 18th century and English Dissent in particular, and perhaps to those with an interest in the history of moral philosophy of that period, but beyond these circles little is known of someone who, in his lifetime, was held in equal standing with Edmund Burke. Indeed, the fact that Burke felt compelled to respond forcefully to Price’s sermon ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’ (1789) is indicative of his reputation. Contrary to the oft-recited history, it was Price’s text and not Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that began the Revolution Controversy, a seminal debate in modern political thought.



In terms of his ethics, Price was notable as a figure who challenged the prevailing moral sentimentalism (the view that our emotions ground our ethical judgments) of those such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Together with his political ideals, which captured much of the radical worldview in the late 18th century, Price’s body of work is representative of a richness in our intellectual heritage that is often overlooked in Britain and beyond – by a mainstream narrative that cleaves to the predominance of empiricism and liberal utilitarianism.



Price, and his remarkable contributions across a range of areas, can be fully appreciated only in light of the religious and social milieu that he occupied, one that is embodied by the term ‘English Dissent’. It reflects both the standing of the Protestant denominations that stood outside the Anglican Church, and their positioning in terms of the reformist agenda that issued from their peripherality, and of which Price would become a leading exponent as a Unitarian minister at Newington Green in north London, where he took up residence in his mid-30s.

Born in 1723, Price was brought up in his native Wales in a dissenting community of a very different kind, at Tynton farm in the Garw Valley (the village of Llangeinor stands there today). His family had close ties with Samuel Jones, who was part of an emerging Puritan movement in Wales during the English Civil War, but who was forced to sequester with the Restoration. With the support of Price’s grandfather and others, Jones was able to establish a meeting house in the Garw Valley that would continue the tradition in the spirit of an orthodox Calvinism that Price himself would come to thoroughly reject. Indeed, this became a familial theological conflict, captured most symbolically in the story of the father, Rhys Price, happening upon his son Richard reading the work of the Anglican cleric Bishop Samuel Clarke, and throwing the offending book into the fire.

snip

[Delmette2.0]

1. Bookmarked to read the full story later.

[niyad]

2. KNR and thank you for sharing this fascinating information. Bookmarking.