SOURCE: Klein, Lawrence E. “The Culture of Liberty.” In Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 195-212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Klein discusses the concepts of discursive, cultural, and political liberty in Shaftesbury's later essays, arguing that, for Shaftesbury, conditions of freedom were necessary in order for the public to be able to make sound judgments.

“politeness”

Shaftesbury may have had qualms about the links between Whiggism and the Court after 1688, but polemics in Queen Anne's reign demanded simplicity. Thus, in his published writings, the Whigs were, simply, the party of liberty, the party that made the 1688 Revolution and opposed the French, the Stuart tyrants, and the High Churchmen. While Shaftesbury identified political liberty with post-1688 political arrangements, he was largely concerned with what we can identify, variously, as cultural, intellectual and, especially, discursive liberty...