Liberty's Apostle - Richard Price, His Life and Times : Richard Price, His Life and Times

Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Richard Price (172391) was a dissenting minister and political radical who is generally agreed to be one of the greatest thinkers Wales has ever produced. Yet to contemporary readers, he is little known, a situation that Paul Frame aims to change with Libertys Apostle , a close look at Prices life and work. Frame explores Prices philosophical thoughtwhich crucially prefigured some of Kants central ideasas well as his political activity, which saw him invited to the nascent United States to assist with its financial administration. Though he declined that offer, he was nonetheless friends with key American figures like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and, when he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Yale in 1781, his fellow honoree was George Washington. Within Britain, meanwhile, one of his claims to fame comes from the groundwork he laid for the modern insurance industry. Frames book sets these achievements and experiences in the context of Prices times, and, in so doing, draws fascinating and instructive parallels between that era and our own. Cover; List of Figures and Plates; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: Rediscovering Richard Price; 1. A Background of Dissent; 2. A London Life; 3. The Virtues of Virtue; 4. The Equitable Life; 5. Science and Society; 6. Freedoms Denied; 7. Price, Franklin and the Club of Honest Whigs; 8. On a Perilous Edge; 9. Revolution in America; 10. Reaction at Home and Abroad; 11. Reform and Contribution at Home; 12. Peace with America; 13. Advising Ireland, Scotland and America; 14. Pitt and the Sinking Fund; 15. The Watershed Years (1786-8); 16. Revolution in France With a setting that encompasses the American and French Revolutions and a cast of characters that includes the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Priestley, Liberty's Apostle tells the story of the little-known Welsh radical thinker of the Enlightenment, Richard Price.