Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain explores some of the themes and issues that exercised thinkers concerned with religion and philosophy, and their interrelatedness, in the period known as the long eighteenth century, while illustrating the techniques and style of intellectual history as practised in the early twenty-first century. The volume will encourage further understanding of the influences that were current at the time that some of the most significant works in western philosophy were written, and use primary materials to achieve this. The essays presented here have been specially commissioned from both established, distinguished collaborators and young, up-and-coming scholars, to illustrate the breadth and diversity of philosophy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a period when ideas were being formed and developed against a background of evolving views in science, politics, and religion, and in light of their implications for traditional religious belief and thought. The figures examined range from Locke and Hume to lesser known personalities who provide a different perspective on the intellectual environment of the time, such as Samuel Halliday, Martin Clifford, and Henry Scougal. In addition, the volume contains new transcriptions of two revealing works by Hume: a letter illustrating his later attitude to political theory, and an early essay on ethics and chivalry.

A bloody episode that epitomised the political dilemmas of the eighteenth century In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Geneva Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Geneva Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets—in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.