Virtue Transformed
Political Argument in England, 1688–1740

This book challenges the received notions of the fortunes of virtue and the politics of virtue today.

Shelley Burtt (Author)

9780521375283, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 January 1992

196 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.46 kg

"This book is easy to admire because it is elegantly brief and lucidly written and, at the same time, it possesses a stimulating and rich complexity." Lawrence E. Klein, Albion

This book offers a detailed study of political argument in early eighteenth-century England, a time in which the politics of virtue were vigorously pursued - and just as vigorously challenged. In tracing the emergence of a privately orientated conception of civic virtue from the period's public discourse, this book not only challenges the received notions of the fortunes of virtue in the early modern era but provides a promising critical perspective on the question of what sort of politics of virtue is possible or desirable today.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The politics of virtue in Augustan England
3. A religious politics of virtue: Low Church Anglicanism and the Societies for Reformation of Manners
4. A republican politics of virtue: the selfish citizen in Cato's Letters
5. Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
6. The Court Whig conception of civic virtue
7. A world without virtue: Mandeville's social and political thought
8. Virtue transformed
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]