Front Page Authors (by Period) Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury

1671 - 1713

About the Author

The grandson of a founder and leader of the English Whigs, and tutored by John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote one of the most intellectually influential works in English of the eighteenth century, the Characteristicks. Widely regarded as the first exponent of the view that ethics derives from reason and “sentiment,” Shaftesbury criticizes not only Locke but, especially, Hobbes for the dim view that “the state of nature” is “a war of all against all.” To the contrary, Shaftesbury argued that human nature responds most fully to representations of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and that human beings naturally desire society.

In The Library:

• author: British Moralists, being Selections from Writers principally of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (1897)
• author: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (1737)
• author: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 1 (1737)
• author: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 2 (1737)
• author: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 3 (1737)