Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury - Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,
Συγγραφέας: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
Έκδοση: 2001 Liberty Fund, Inc. United States of America
Αρχική Έκδοση: G. Olms, 1711
In 1711, he collected his mature works into a single volume and added to them extensive notes and commentary, naming the book Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (C). He revised the Characteristics over the course of the next two years, up until his death in 1713. A new edition came out in 1714. Shaftesbury took great pains to design illustrations for the Characteristics, which he thought would advance his central claims as effectively as the written text (see Paknadel 1974).
In addition to the Characteristics, there are two posthumous collections of Shaftesbury's writings: the Second Characteristics, which is concerned chiefly with the visual arts, and Shaftesbury's philosophical notebooks, which Rand collected in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury. The notebooks are particularly interesting, as they offer a view of Shaftesbury's private ruminations and his profound commitment to Stoic philosophy. Shaftesbury's fame and influence are chiefly due to the Characteristics, however.
The Characteristics is a remarkable volume. It covers a great many topics, ranging freely over morality, art, politics, religion, aesthetics, and culture, and it is written in a variety of different styles, including epistles, soliloquies, dialogues, and treatises. The overarching goal of the book, as Klein has put it in his very helpful introduction, is to make its readers “effective participants in the world” (C viii). Shaftesbury saw the Characteristics as an exercise in practical (and not merely speculative) philosophy—a work that would make people happier, more virtuous, and more civil. (See M part 1, section 1.)
The Characteristics was extremely popular in Britain and Europe. As Den Uyl points out, "Other than Locke's Second Treatise, Shaftesbury's Characteristics ... was the most reprinted book in English in the [eighteenth] century" (Den Uyl vii). Anybody with intellectual aspirations was sure to be acquainted with it. Shaftesbury was a towering figure in Britain in the 18th century in much the same way as J.S. Mill was in Victorian England and J.P. Sartre was in post-war France.
