The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin

Examining the intellectual roots of Benjamin Franklin, this work begins by tracing the evolution of young Franklin's theology of works between the letters of Silence Dogood (1722) and his impassioned defence of the heterdox Irish clergyman Samuel Hemphill in 1735. The author places the 25 year production of Poor Richard's almanac in the context of the early 18th-century moral and educational psychology. He examines the broad intellectual continuities uniting Franklin's 1726 journal of his return voyage to Philadelphia with successive editions of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity , first published in 1751. The book also offers an examination of Franklin's seminal, and controversial, 1751 essay Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind .