The political thought of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury has long been associated, along with that of his grandfather, the First Earl, with the tradition of English radicalism. Examination of Shaftesbury’s political and philosophical writings demonstrates his credentials as a radical thinker of the time; however, revisionists oppose this view, shedding light on his endorsement of the constitutional status quo as it was established after the Revolution of 1688-9. This essay rejects both interpretations, arguing that it is possible to consider Shaftesbury a radical thinker, but that the notion itself demands rethinking in its own historical milieu. While it is clear that Shaftesbury never abandoned reformist aspirations during his lifetime, it is anachronistic to use the notion as defined in the nineteenth-century European experience in what Eric Hobsbawm calls “the Century of Revolution.” What is long overdue in Shaftesbury studies is not so much to remove such a label as radicalism from his political thought as to throw important new light on its varieties. A closer examination of his unpublished correspondence reveals that his radicalism was frequently being inflected at some crucial historical moments ― particularly those relating to the national political debate on the union of England and Scotland before and after the passing of the Acts of Union in 1707. It also demonstrates that at the heart of such inflections lay his consideration of and adherence to English nationalism.

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