Of the origin of government : the afterlives of Locke and Filmer in an eighteenth-century British debate

This article describes a debate about the basis of allegiance to government that is obscured from view by the historiographical controversy about whether it is liberalism or republicanism that is the key to understanding eighteenth-century Anglophone political thought. This debate is between those who subscribe, more or less, to the principles of Locke, and those who subscribe, more or less, to the principles of Filmer. Taking the Hanoverian succession as my point of departure, I present an outline account of what I take to be the mainstream eighteenth-century argument about the origin of government, up to and including the aftermath of the French Revolution. It played out largely in sermons and occasional pamphlets, written by individuals who, for the most part, did not acquire significant reputations, even in their own age. I then turn to a succession of more familiar writers, from Hume to Burke, who sought to transform argument about the source of political legitimacy by abandoning the question of the origins of government in favour, usually, of considerations of utility. Yet, as they attempted to change the terms of debate about the principles of government, these writers made constructive use of ideas and arguments usually associated with Filmer.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Poverty as a political problem in late eighteenth-century Britain : Smith, Burke, Malthus

In eighteenth-century Britain, there was more than one way of thinking about poverty. For some, poverty was an essentially moral problem. Another way of conceiving of poverty was in economic terms. In this article, however, I want to consider some eighteenth-century versions of the idea that poverty might be a political issue. What I have in mind is the idea that a society containing a large proportion of very poor people might be, just for that reason, an unstable and disordered society. I argue, first, that this idea is central to Smith's treatment of poverty in The Wealth of Nations. Then, after a brief account of how Paine and Godwin imagined the end of poverty, I describe the further development and refinement of Smithian lines of thought in Burke and Malthus. My conclusion is that Smith, Burke, and Malthus constitute evidence that present-day ideas of social justice derive more from the nineteenth century and subsequent developments in moral and political thought than from the early modern period.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Some people and the people

PostprintNon peer reviewe

Phillipson's Hume in Phillipson's Scottish Enlightenment

The subject of this paper is the place of Hume in Nicholas Phillipson's account of the Scottish Enlightenment. I begin with Phillipson's reading of Hume as ‘civic moralist’. I then turn to his account of Hume the author of The History of England. And from there I proceed to the place of Hume in his intellectual biography of Adam Smith. I conclude with a brief description of Phillipson's understanding of Hume's place in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment as it mutated in the late eighteenth century and came to an end in the early nineteenth. I show how just as Phillipson's Hume cannot be understood apart from the Scottish Enlightenment, so also Phillipson's Scottish Enlightenment cannot be understood without HumePublisher PDFPeer reviewe

How to write a history of philosophy? The case of eighteenth-century Britain

This paper raises the question of how a history of the philosophy of eighteenth-century Britain should be written. First, it describes the usual answer to this question, which divides the period into what happened before Hume, then Hume, then responses to Hume. It notes that this answer does not correspond well with how the period saw itself. It then considers how ‘philosophy’ is defined in Britain in the eighteenth century, taking into account dictionary definitions, book titles, and university syllabi. Obvious differences between eighteenth-century and twenty-first-century philosophy are explored, including the idea that ‘natural philosophy’ is as much part of philosophy as moral philosophy, metaphysics, and logic, and the difficulty of making a distinction between philosophy and what we now call psychology. In the final section of the paper some difficulties are raised regarding the hypothesis that ‘enlightenment’ might provide an organizing concept for a more historically sensitive account of eighteenth-century British philosophy.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Cambrian Hydrocarbon Potential Indicated in Kentucky\u27s Rome Trough

A recent gas discovery in the Rome Trough has resulted in a new phase of deep exploration in eastern Kentucky. This activity is located in Elliott County, near the northern boundary fault of the Cambrian Rome Trough graben. The Carson Associates No. 1 Kazee well was drilled in 1994, and blew out with a reported uncontrolled flow of 11 million cubic feet of gas per day. Although completed at a much lower rate, this well renewed interest in the deep gas potential of the Rome Trough, which has seen sporadic drilling activity since the 1940\u27s. Gas production in the Rome Trough is from marine sandstones and fractured shales assigned to the Cambrian Rome Formation or Conasauga Group. These units are significantly thicker in the fault-bounded extensional graben that trends west-southwest to northeast in eastern Kentucky and continues through West Virginia and Pennsylvania into New York. Recent mapping of the Precambrian basement surface has refined the structure of eastern Kentucky and the Rome Trough. Reservoir fades include fine- to very fine-grained, micaceous, and glauconitic sandstones and fractured shales. Coarser sandstones may occur near border faults, in fan-delta deposits. Traps are primarily structural, and faulting was contemporaneous with deposition. Stratigraphic traps may also exist in the trough, but have not been proven by drilling to date. Stratigraphic traps may include sandstones deposited in turbidite fans in deeper parts of the graben. Potential hydrocarbon source rocks have not been identified. Limited geochemical analyses of well and outcrop samples from the Rome and Conasauga intervals show poor hydrocarbon source potential. Composition of gas produced from the Rome Trough varies significantly in eastern Kentucky. Several occurrences of gas high in nitrogen and helium content were found in the western part of the trough, and may be related to proximity to the Grenville Front. Gas of commercial quality is typical in the eastern part of the trough, where several wells are producing gas with Btu values over 1,000. Significant hydrocarbon potential remains in the Rome Trough, but this play is characterized by complex faulting that influenced the deposition and distribution of potential reservoir rocks. Interpretation of high-quality seismic data will be a key factor to future success in this play

The Ages of the Thin Disk, Thick Disk, and the Halo from Nearby White Dwarfs

We present a detailed analysis of the white dwarf luminosity functions derived from the local 40 pc sample and the deep proper motion catalog of Munn et al (2014, 2017). Many of the previous studies ignored the contribution of thick disk white dwarfs to the Galactic disk luminosity function, which results in an erronous age measurement. We demonstrate that the ratio of thick/thin disk white dwarfs is roughly 20\% in the local sample. Simultaneously fitting for both disk components, we derive ages of 6.8-7.0 Gyr for the thin disk and 8.7 $\pm$ 0.1 Gyr for the thick disk from the local 40 pc sample. Similarly, we derive ages of 7.4-8.2 Gyr for the thin disk and 9.5-9.9 Gyr for the thick disk from the deep proper motion catalog, which shows no evidence of a deviation from a constant star formation rate in the past 2.5 Gyr. We constrain the time difference between the onset of star formation in the thin disk and the thick disk to be $1.6^{+0.3}_{-0.4}$ Gyr. The faint end of the luminosity function for the halo white dwarfs is less constrained, resulting in an age estimate of $12.5^{+1.4}_{-3.4}$ Gyr for the Galactic inner halo. This is the first time ages for all three major components of the Galaxy are obtained from a sample of field white dwarfs that is large enough to contain significant numbers of disk and halo objects. The resultant ages agree reasonably well with the age estimates for the oldest open and globular clusters.Comment: ApJ, in pres