Country and Humanity: The Tensions of Universal Benevolence in Richard Price’s Discourse >>> Emmy Hammond The concept of universal benevolence and its role in relation to the individual and the nation was a question permeating Enlightenment thought, and one of the most fundamental and contentious questions rekindled in England by the occurrence of the French Revolution.1 Richard Price, an English Dissenting minister and political radical known internationally for his moral and political theory, was largely responsible for sparking the main debates in England over the French Revolution with his sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.2 First preached at a Dissenting chapel in London on November 4, 1789, the sermon is perhaps best known today as the publication to which Edmund Burke responded in his landmark conservative work Reflections on the Revolution in France. This paper examines the concept of universal benevolence in the Discourse as a political position within the context of eighteenth century political thought, as manifested in the Revolution debate, and the ways in which the concept was both grounded in Price’s work and also competed with notions of patriotism or loyalty to a nation or community, rather than humanity. I argue that Price’s conception of duties or loyalties owed to the nation, i.e. patriotism, are overshadowed by his more radical commitment to the duties or loyalties of individuals and nations to humanity as a whole, i.e. universal benevolence, which was grounded in the role of reason in his moral philosophy. Critically, however, his conception of universal benevolence is complicated by the fact that he also couches universal benevolence in terms of patriotic duty, leading to an at times contradictory conception of national or community loyalty and universal loyalty as both indivisible and competing. Scholars of the eighteenth century have identified universal benevolence as a recurring theme in the writings of eighteenth century theorists and politicians, and have examined the concept from a variety of angles. Evan Radcliffe traces “sympathy and benevolence” as a political concept from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes to Mandeville and then to Richard Price as well as many of Price’s contemporaries, notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and others. He identifies the most pervasive questions in Price’s time as, first, the question of how far benevolence should be extended, with universality being the farthest and most radical point, and, second, of how far this most extensive form of benevolence should take precedence over more local benevolence such as ties to family, community, or nation.3 Other scholarly pieces concentrated more specifically on Price, especially those by Susan Rae Peterson and Winston Barnes, have examined the way in which his political theory, such as articulated in the Discourse, stems from his moral philosophy and his overriding and quintessentially Enlightenment faith in the capacity of human reason. Naturally, given his position in the context of a time when rights and liberties were being radically questioned and re-defined, there have also been important studies on Price’s conception of rights, such
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