ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the best of the speculation on liberty’s benefits, and the probing of the relations between art and society that such inquiries encouraged, as an integral and influential part of that science. It also proposes more positive benefits from the speculation on liberty than R. H. Tawney’s vision of eighteenth-century pragmatism would allow. In 1770, John Armstrong wrote that the eighteenth-century had suffered a “sickly wane” and “impotent decline”, and “from a hopeful boy became a most insignificant man; and for anything that appears at present will die a very fat drowsy blockhead. In tracing the development of these ideas concentrating more on assessments by eighteenth-century writers of their own cultural circumstances than on building a wider historical critique. In the broader historical perspectives that have since appeared, that critique has been extended, with the grander spiritual claims and the flourishing of the bourgeois, imperialist and mercantilist ideology that they graced, receiving a singularly bad press.
