Subjects
The English Deists:
Studies in Early Enlightenment
Wayne Hudson
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 619 6: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
Hudson reinterprets the works of an important group of writers known as ‘the English deists’: Charles Blount (1654-1693), John Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins (1679-1729), Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), Thomas Morgan (nd-1743), Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) and Peter Annet (1693-1769). Historians tend to assume that these figures accepted deism as a totalising outlook. Hudson, however, argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking.
Adopting a distinctive position with implications for contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, Hudson contextualises these writers in the context of Early Enlightenment which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition. Apart from providing a new account of the geneologies of deism, and of the work of Herbert of Cherbury in particular, he rereads these writers as controversialists with multiple, and not single, identities. These writers sought to promote ‘freethinking’ or the rational examination of accepted beliefs in every area of public culture, but they were not dogmatic about what ‘freethinking’ would lead a fair-minded person to conclude. The issue for them was to achieve rational liberty in a modern state. This is the first modern study to do justice to these radical theologians as a group of related writers who helped to bring modern civil society into being.