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John Wilkes And The Enlightenment, Stephen Carruthers

Masters

Based on the absence of a substantial political philosophy and a scandalous reputation, modern assessments of John Wilkes have tended to marginalise his role in the development of radical political ideas in England in the 1760s and 1770s. This evaluation is reassessed in the context of an analysis of Wilkes’s collaboration with Charles Churchill on the North Briton and his political writings of the period, in particular his Introduction to the History of England (1768). Furthermore, Wilkes enjoyed extensive and prolonged contact with the leading continental philosophers of the period, and in particular d’Holbach, Diderot, Suard, Helvétius, and Chastellux, which …