ABSTRACT
Richard Price (1723-91) gained fame and attracted notoriety because of the range of his intellectual accomplishments and the depth of his commitment to religious and civil liberty. He was well known in Britain, America, and France for his contributions in many fields: as a Dissenting minister, an educationist, a theologian, a moral philosopher, a mathematician, a financial expert, and a best-selling political propagandist commenting upon the American and French revolutions. 1 These activities led him to mix with leading British politicians (particularly Lord Shelburne), to be beloved in Dissenting circles (even by such a noted controversialist as Joseph Priestley), and to correspondence with leading men in France and America (such as Turgot, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Jefferson, Franklin, Rush, John Adams, and Winthrop) . 2 While he lived he was offered the citizenship of the United States and of France, and when he died, in 1791, he was mourned by reformers across the Atlantic world as 'the apostle of liberty'. None the less, despite his formidable achievements, he was bitterly attacked for both his religious and his political views. He was criticized for the shallowness and inconsistency of his moral philosophy and his religious opinions, and he was accused of being a political fanatic who inflamed the passions of the multitude and disturbed the public peace. To this day, he is best remembered as the principal British target for Edmund Burke's invective in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
