SOURCE: Richardson, Robert D., Jr. “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism: Shaftesbury, Schleiermacher, Emerson.” Symbiosis 1, no. 1 (April 1997): 1-20.

In the excerpt below, Richardson briefly summarizes Shaftesbury's major ideas and his influence on writers and philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It has often been noted that the Cambridge Platonists had a direct impact on American Transcendentalism; what is less often remarked is the even more massive indirect influence exerted by the Cambridge Platonists through Shaftesbury. Indeed, Shaftesbury, whom Herder called ‘the beloved Plato of Europe’ is probably the main person through whose work Liberal Platonism gets into the mainstream of eighteenth-century thought.¹ Shaftesbury was John Locke's student. He edited a volume of Whichcote's writings, and was, according to his modern editor the ‘greatest Stoic of modern times’, and together with Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, one of the three major exponents of Stoic thought. The Stoic element in Shaftesbury was...