ABSTRACT
Benjamin Rush's civilizing mission and responses to it afford a unique opportunity to explore sociability and cosmopolitanism at and from the fringes of the Enlightenment. Thus, after considering Rush's early republican context, his theories of sociability and progress, and his colonialist application of civilizing mission to the rural world. This chapter takes the Enlightenment to its intellectual fringes by studying what Jorge Canizares-Esguerra has described as the intellectual creativity on those peripheries. Historians has turned time and again to Benjamin Rush's writing, highlighting how his thought was put into the service of the Enlightenment's belief. This essay has endeavoured to investigate the articulation of sociability outside of Europe, and attempted to turn people attention toward traditions and ideas often overlooked by Enlightenment scholarship. Rush was not a fringe philosopher; he was and remains a central figure to students of classical republicanism and the American Enlightenment.
