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This information about Richard Price comes from Ellis Sandoz's introduction
to his sermon "On
the Love of one's Country" in vol. II
of Political
Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805:
Richard Price (1723–1791).
Born at Tynton in Glamorganshire, Wales, Price
gained fame as a supporter of the American and
French revolutions. A friend of Benjamin Franklin,
he was a liberal Presbyterian minister and a moral
philosopher whose critique of the Scottish philosophy
of Francis Hutcheson in Review of the Principal
Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1758)
came to be regarded as a significant anticipation
of Kant’s ethics in certain respects and
of nineteenth-century intuitionism in others.
With Joseph Priestly, Price also published A
Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism
and Philosophical Necessity (1778), written
in the form of a debate. As a result of his publication
of a reply to David Hume’s essay on miracles,
Price had a D.D. degree conferred upon him by
the University of Aberdeen.
As an expert on finance and insurance, Price
was selected to become a member of the Royal Society
in 1765 for work on the theory of probability
as applied to actuarial questions. His recommendation
of a sinking fund to cope with problems of national
debt influenced both French and British policy.
Price’s vehement support for American independence
came primarily through publication of two pamphlets
that circulated widely at home and in America:
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty,
the Principles of Government, and the Justice
and Policy of the War with America (1776)
and Additional Observations . . . (1777).
Offered American citizenship, he declined, but
he did address Congress when invited in 1778,
was inducted into the American Philosophical Society,
and was awarded (along with George Washington)
an LL.D. by Yale in 1781. Price’s The
Importance of the American Revolution appeared
in 1784.
The celebrated sermon that follows was preached
in London on November 4, 1789, the 101st anniversary
of the Glorious Revolution. It presents Price’s
apocalyptic view of the dawning of the millennium
through the spread of liberty and happiness over
the world, especially as evinced in French developments
at the time. This point, according to A. J. Grieve,
was for Edmund Burke the “grit around which
he built up his pearl”—namely, Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790). The gentility
of Price’s encomium for the French revolutionaries
contrasts drastically with Burke’s savage
ridicule:
Is it because liberty in the abstract may be
classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that
I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has
escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome
darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the
enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate
a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison,
upon the recovery of his natural rights? This
would be to act over again the scene of the criminals
condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer
[Don Quixote], the metaphysic knight
of the sorrowful countenance.
In rebuttal to Price’s central proposition
that the people of England have three fundamental
rights that the French aspire to (“To choose
our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct;
and to frame a government for ourselves”),
Burke scathingly retorted: “We have an inheritable
crown; an inheritable peerage; and a House of
Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises,
and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.”
Burke was answered not only by the aged, ailing
Price, but also by Thomas Paine in The Rights
of Man (1792). Paine, a writer of comparable
intellect but of far less gentility—being
every bit Burke’s equal in the fine old
art of invective—vindicated Price’s
three fundamental rights. Indeed, Price’s
sermon was the starting point for what Thomas
W. Copeland designated “the most crucial
ideological debate ever carried on in English.”
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