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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 November 2020
Richard Price (1723–91) is important in present-day historiography chiefly for the interpretation of two great revolutions, the American and the French. Recent studies have depicted him as insightfully forward-looking, a well-informed cosmopolitan, his thought providing an interpretive key to the Age of Revolutions, and so as a landmark figure of a singular Enlightenment. They have paid insufficient attention to his identity as a theologian, a Welsh-born Nonconformist minister of more defined outlook, spending his life in England and campaigning above all for the relief of Nonconformist grievances, picturing “tyranny” and “superstition” in conventional Nonconformist terms. This article offers a reconsideration of the significance of such a Price for the historical understanding of two major and (it contends) related problems: how did the American Revolution relate to the French in a supposed Age of Revolutions, and how should they be understood as putative episodes in the development of the Enlightenment?
1 An account of the recent historiography of “the Enlightenment” and its eighteenth-century antecedents in Britain, France and Germany will be offered in a book by the present author; it is beyond the scope of this article. For a critique of the concept of the Age of Revolutions as dependent on the retrojection of recent teleologies that seemed self-evident in the 1960s but are now problematic see Clark, J. C. D., Thomas Paine: Britain, America and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Oxford, 2018), 9–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 101–6 and passim.
2 Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; now problematic following de Bolla, Peter, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Clark, Thomas Paine, esp. 258–77.
4 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain (London, 1790), 49–50.
5 An element of normative celebration can sometimes hinder the assessment of how much Price actually knew. Cone, Carl B., Torchbearer of Freedom: The Influence of Richard Price on Eighteenth-Century Thought (Lexington, 1952)Google Scholar; Thomas, D. O., The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar; Frame, Paul, Liberty's Apostle: Richard Price, His Life and Times (Cardiff, 2015)Google Scholar.
6 Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution (London, 1791), 85–109Google Scholar.
7 Clark, Thomas Paine, 424.
8 Jefferson, from Paris, to James Madison, 30 Jan. 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, ed. Julian P. Boyd and Lyman H. Butterfield (Princeton, 1956), 95. All emphasis is original unless otherwise noted.
9 Jonathan Clark, “Monuments to Liberty,” Times Literary Supplement, 18 Sept. 2015, 14–15.
10 Price, from London, to Rochefoucauld, 2 July 1790, in The Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas, 3 vols. (Durham, NC, 1983–94), 3: 307.
11 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London relative to that Event (London, 1790)Google Scholar, 109, 129, 207, 347. “Dr. Price seems rather to over-value the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and diffused in this age. The last century appears to me to have been quite as much enlightened.” Ibid., 97.
12 “Why cannot the French nation act relatively to Louis XVI. as the United Provinces of America have acted with respect to George III.?” Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, Reflections on the English Revolution of 1688, and that of the French, August 10, 1792. By Condorcet. Translated from the French (London, 1792), 26–7.
13 McMahon, Darrin M., “Illuminating the Enlightenment: Public Lighting Practices in the Siècle des Lumières,” Past & Present 240 (2018), 119–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind: being a posthumous work of the late M. de Condorcet. Translated from the French (London, 1795), 317.
15 Price, Richard, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and The Means of making it a Benefit to the World (London, 1784), 4Google Scholar.
16 Price, from Hackney, to Jefferson, 3 Aug. 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 248.
17 Ibid.
18 Price wrote of “any process of reasoning” and of “the whole plan and process of a moral government” in Price, Richard, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (London, 1758)Google Scholar, 169, 173, 461, 485; of a “process” as a mathematical calculation in Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, 3rd edn, (Dublin, 1772), 179, 221; of something happening “in process of time” in Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 148. These usages were few in number and insignificant in substance. Only once did he come close to a present-day sense, but writing of the natural sciences: if a razor were “to be wholly dissolved in any acid liquor, its power of cutting will certainly be lost, or cease to be, though no particle of the metal that constituted the razor be annihilated by the process.” [Price, Richard], A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778), 82–3Google Scholar.
19 Clark, Thomas Paine, 7–8.
20 Price, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, 123, 149, 171, 344, 396.
21 Price, Richard, Four Dissertations (London, 1767), 152, 285Google Scholar.
22 Price, Richard, Additional Observations On the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London, 1777), xi, 44, 55, 147Google Scholar.
23 Price, Richard, The General Introduction and Supplement to Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Finances of the Kingdom (London, 1778), xv, 195Google Scholar.
24 Price, Richard, An Essay on the Population of England, From the Revolution to the present Time (London, 1780), 17, 28Google Scholar.
25 Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 2, 24, 56, 64, 70.
26 Richard Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind, with the Means and Duty of Promoting It, represented in a Discourse, delivered on Wednesday the 25th of April, 1787, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, London, to the Supporters of a New Academical Institution among Protestant Dissenters (London, 1787), 20, 25–7.
27 Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 24, 41.
28 Frame, Liberty's Apostle, 18.
29 For the theologies of Price and Priestley see Clark, J. C. D., English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), 380Google Scholar, 396–404.
30 Price and Priestley were, however, drawn to both pre- and postmillennialist positions (in which the Second Coming would precede or follow the thousand years of blessedness respectively), and “defy simple categorization.” Fruchtman, Jack Jr, “The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century Republican Millennialism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 73/4 (1983), 1–125Google Scholar, at 6.
31 Price, Four Dissertations, 137–8; Price, Richard, Britain's Happiness, and The Proper Improvement of it, represented in a Sermon, Preach'd At Newington-Green, Middlesex, On Nov. 29. 1759. Being the Day appointed for a General Thanksgiving (London, 1759), 10, 22–3Google Scholar.
32 Price, Richard, The Vanity, Misery, and Infamy, of Knowledge without suitable Practice; Represented in a Sermon preached at Hackney, November 4th, 1770 (London, 1770), 24Google Scholar.
33 Price, Richard, Sermons on the Christian Doctrine as received by the Different Denominations of Christians (London, 1787), 313Google Scholar.
34 Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement, 50.
35 Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 56, 64.
36 Clark, English Society 1660–1832, 375–7, 379–80, 396–8.
37 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Williams, Helen Maria, Letters written in France, in the Summer of 1790 (London, 1791)Google Scholar; Calonne, M. de, Considerations on the Present and Future State of France (London, 1791)Google Scholar; Condorcet, Marquis de, Reflections on the English Revolution of 1688, and that of the French, August 10, 1792 (London, 1792)Google Scholar.
38 Wyvill, Christopher, A Defence of Dr. Price, and the Reformers of England (London, 1792)Google Scholar.
39 Gallery of Portraits of the National Assembly, supposed to be written by Count de Mirabeau, 2 vols. (London, 1790), 1: 111; Mackintosh, James, Vindiciae Gallicae: Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers (London, 1790), 221Google Scholar; An Impartial History of the late Revolution in France, from its Commencement to the Death of the Queen, and the Execution of the Deputies of the Gironde Party, 2 vols. (London, 1794), 1: 16.
40 du Pan, Jacques Mallet, Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution; and on the Causes which Prolong its Duration. Translated from the French of M. [Jacques] Mallet du Pan (London, 1793), 9Google Scholar.
41 Priestley, Joseph, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c. (London, 1791)Google Scholar.
42 Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View, 257–8, 316, 320, 325, 337–8.
43 Ibid., 262–3, 265–7.
44 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet, The Life of M. Turgot, Comptroller General of the Finances of France, in the Years 1774, 1775, and 1776; written by the Marquis of Condorcet, of the French Academy of Sciences; and translated from the French (London, 1787), 243, 410–12.
45 Thomas, The Honest Mind, 174–86, esp. 184, 186. Frame, Liberty's Apostle, 37, identifies Price as an Arian by 1758.
46 Price, Britain's Happiness, and The Proper Improvement of it.
47 Frame, Liberty's Apostle, 81.
48 Thomas, D. O., Richard Price and America (1723–91) (Aberystwyth, 1975), 8–10Google Scholar.
49 Bell, James B., A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Chauncy, from Boston, to Price, 22 March 1770, in Price, Correspondence, 1: 89.
51 Chauncy, from Boston, to Price, 5 Oct. 1772, in ibid., 1: 143. On the American bishop issue see also Stiles, from Newport, to Price, 20 Nov. 1772, in ibid., 1: 149.
52 Stiles, from Newport, to Price, 10 April 1775, in ibid., 1: 199.
53 Thomas, The Honest Mind, 149.
54 Price, from Newington Green, to Stiles, 2 Nov. 1772, in Price, Correspondence, 1: 165.
55 Price, from Newington Green, to Chauncy, 25 Feb. 1775, in ibid., 1: 188–9.
56 Price, from Newington Green, to Henry Marchant, 2 Nov. 1772, in ibid., 1: 164.
57 “In the preceding Essay I have offered a good deal of evidence to prove that, while other countries are increasing, this country, in consequence of the causes of depopulation which have unhappily distinguished it, has for many years been decreasing,” partly due to “that very evil which has destroyed the common people … the increase of luxury.” Price, An Essay on the Population of England, 26, 36.
58 Chauncy, from Boston, to Price 18 July 1774, in Price, Correspondence, 1: 173.
59 John Winthrop, from Cambridge, MA, to Price, 20 Sept. 1774, in ibid., 1: 176.
60 Chauncy, from Boston, to Price 10 Jan. 1775, in ibid., 1: 183.
61 Price, from Newington Green, to Jonathan Trumbull Sr, 8 Oct. 1784, in ibid., 2: 233.
62 Thomas, The Honest Mind, 260–83; for Price's mythical idealizations of American life see ibid., 262–3.
63 Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 2.
64 Ibid., 1, 3, 7.
65 Ibid., 3, 5–7, 31, 56, 64, 70.
66 Ibid., 6, 9–10, 12, 16, 20, 23, 35, 37, 46, 65, 71, 74–5, 77–8.
67 Ibid., 42, 48, 72, 84–5.
68 Price, from Newington Green, to Stiles, 2 Aug. 1785, in Price, Correspondence, 2: 296.
69 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 7 Aug. 1785, in ibid., 2: 298; Price to John Clarke [May 1786], in ibid., 3: 36.
70 Samuel Vaughan, from Philadelphia, to Price, 4 Jan. 1785, in ibid., 2: 254.
71 Price, from Newington Green, to Jefferson, 21 March 1785, in ibid., 2: 268.
72 Rush, from Philadelphia, to Price, 25 May 1786, in ibid., 3: 31.
73 Price, from Newington Green, to Rush, 30 July 1786, in ibid., 3: 55–6. The newly independent American Episcopalian Church turned to the Church of England for the consecration of bishops rather than electing its own.
74 Thomas, The Honest Mind, 284–93.
75 John Adams, from Auteuil, to Price, 8 April 1785, in ibid., 2: 272.
76 Price, from Hackney, to Franklin, 26 Sept. 1787, in ibid., 3: 149.
77 Price, from Hackney, to Franklin, 26 Sept. 1787, in ibid., 3: 150; Price, from Hackney, to Lansdowne, 10 Nov. 1787, in ibid., 3: 152; [Godwin, William], History of the Internal Affairs of the United Provinces, from the Year 1780, to the Commencement of Hostilities in June 1787 (London, 1787)Google Scholar.
78 For the limits to Jefferson's understanding of French events see Palmer, R. R., “The Dubious Democrat: Thomas Jefferson in Bourbon France,” Political Science Quarterly 72/3 (1957), 388–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “He had no idea, at this time, that America might be a model for Europe; it was the British government that he thought the French ought to imitate … He had no feeling of impending revolution … He could with difficulty think of revolution as something demanded from below … He thought of revolution as something to be arranged by persons already active in political affairs.” Ibid., 402–3.
79 Price, from Hackney, to Jefferson, 26 Oct. 1788, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 182.
80 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 8 Jan. 1789, in ibid., 3: 195–9.
81 American “exceptionalism is clear: before 1789, neither Paine nor Jefferson saw events in France as heading for an American system of government.” Philp, Mark, “Revolutionaries in Paris: Paine, Jefferson, and Democracy,” in Newman, Simon P. and Onuf, Peter S., eds., Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions (Charlottesville, 2013), 137–60Google Scholar, at 141, 145–6, 148–9. Philp argues that French events in 1793–6 “began to reconfirm for Paine and Jefferson a sense of America's difference.” Ibid., 153. Price, dying in 1791, could not learn from this subsequent phase of the French Revolution.
82 Price, from Hackney, to John Adams, 5 March 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 208.
83 Price, from Hackney, to Jefferson, 4 May 1789, in ibid., 3: 218.
84 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 19 May 1789, in ibid., 3: 223.
85 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 12 July 1789, in ibid., 3: 233.
86 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 17 July 1789, in ibid., 3: 234.
87 Jefferson, from Paris, to Price, 13 Sept. 1789, in ibid., 3: 258.
88 Morgan, George Cadogan and Morgan, Richard Price, Travels in Revolutionary France & a Journey across America by George Cadogan Morgan & Richard Price Morgan, ed. Constantine, Mary-Ann and Frame, Paul (Cardiff, 2012), 41–76Google Scholar, at 19, 49, 63. Eight letters survive dated from 5 July to 17 Aug. 1789; others may have been lost, but there is no evidence from Price that he learned from them more than that Morgan was concerned for “the general rights of man,” that Paris was “all in arms for liberty,” or that Price borrowed Morgan's phrase about “a king DRAGGED in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects.” Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. C., J. D. Clark (Stanford, 2001), 224–5 n.Google Scholar; Frame, Liberty's Apostle, 214, quoting an extract reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine 60 (1790), 1097. The letter was evidently first printed in the Gazetteer of 13 Aug. and 14 Sept. 1789, but no copies survive. Thomas, D. O., “Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dissenting Gentlemen,” Notes and Queries 29 (1982), 202–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Price, from Hackney, to [William Stephens] Smith, 28 July 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 238–9. By contrast the editor, at 238 n., drew attention to press reports collected in the Gentleman's Magazine in its section “American News” on “political, economic, religious, and cultural confusion, treaty violations, the need for barter because of the lack of currency, poverty, even the lack of food and water.”
90 Price, from Hackney, to Jefferson, 3 Aug. 1789, in ibid., 3: 247.
91 All of the letters from Price printed in Price, Correspondence, are in English. Only once in print did Price cite Rousseau: Price, Four Dissertations, 151. This was a reference to Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755); but the work had been translated, as A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind. By John James Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva (London, 1761). Price once cited Voltaire, in A Sermon, delivered to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters at Hackney (London, 1779), 20; again, he quoted a translation, Historical Memoirs of the Author of the Henriade, with some Original Pieces. To which are added, Genuine Letters of Mr. de Voltaire (London, 1777), 194. A passing reference to Voltaire in a jointly authored book was by Priestley: A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity, In a Correspondence between Dr. Price, and Dr. Priestley (London, 1778), 192.
92 Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind, with the Means and Duty of Promoting it, 51, citing Condorcet, The Life of M. Turgot. This tally is scant evidence for Price's command of French.
93 Price, from Hackney, to Mirabeau, 2 July 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 229–30.
94 Price, from “Southern-Down near Bridgend Glamorganshire,” to Lansdowne, 16 Aug. 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 251, “a poor cottage on a high cliff hanging over a vast gulph which separates Glamorganshire from Somersetshire and Devonshire”; Beryl Thomas and D. O. Thomas (eds.), “Richard Price's Journal for the period 25 March 1787 to 6 February 1791,” National Library of Wales Journal 21 (1980), 366–413, at 390–91.
95 I.e. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, the main anti-ministerial daily paper.
96 Price, from Southern Down, to Lansdowne, 9 Sept. 1789, in Price, Correspondence, 3: 256.
97 Price, from Hackney, to John Adams, 1 Feb. 1790, in ibid., 3: 271.
98 Thomas, The Honest Mind, 304.
99 Adams, n.p., to Price, 19 April 1790, in ibid., 3: 281–2.
100 Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 8, 12, 13–14, 17, 37–9.
101 For this argument at length, Clark, Thomas Paine, 217–330.
102 Gentz, Friedrich von, The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution. Translated from the German of [Friedrich von] Gentz; by an American Gentleman [John Quincy Adams] (Philadelphia, 1800)Google Scholar, 3, 6, 55–6. Gentz was thereby obliged to repudiate “the writings of Dr. Price” on the American Revolution (ibid., 57), presumably Price's claims in 1784 of its future international significance.
103 Palmer, R. R., The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959–64)Google Scholar, asserting a link between the two revolutions, therefore became assimilated to the assumptions of Koch, Adrienne, “Introduction,” in Koch (ed.), The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (New York, 1965), 19–48Google Scholar, at 21 for Price; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 26–30Google Scholar, at 132 for Price; May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, for Price, 158–9, 171, 192–3; Commager, Henry Steele, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (London, 1978)Google Scholar, for Price, 41, 112, 223–4.