A Dissertation Upon Parties
by Henry St. John Bolingbroke
A Dissertation upon Parties was originally published in 1733 in the form of nineteen letters, and was notable for its sustained attack on the policies of Robert Walpole, commonly held to be the first prime minister of England, and in its calls for leaders of the Whigs and Tories (England’s two leading political parties at the time) to work together in an effort to renew constitutional safeguards allegedly weakened due to corruption within the British government.[1] It was written by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a leader of the Tories and renowned English politician and political philosopher.[2]
Becoming a Member of Parliament in 1701, Bolingbroke subsequently served in the positions of Secretary of War and Secretary of State of both the Northern and Southern Departments.[3] He was forced to flee to Paris in 1715 after being charged with treason for supporting the Jacobite rebellion, which sought to overthrow King George I, but he was pardoned eight years later and returned to England.[4] A prominent member of the “country party,” a group of Tories and disaffected Whigs who opposed what they perceived as the self-interested actions of England’s politicians and parliamentary leaders, his ideas were presented in A Dissertation upon Parties along with several other essays he published around the same period.[5]
While the ideology expressed in A Dissertation upon Parties proved to have limited sway over English thought, it was exceptionally more influential in the American colonies where Bolingbroke’s writings were widely read by individuals such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.[6] His warnings concerning corruption within the British Court were particularly significant in the development of the political philosophy of Republicanism,[7] or the belief that people are entitled to certain unalienable rights that cannot be deprived by any form of government, a central tenet of the American Revolution and the system of values it fomented.
Bibliographic Information
Author: Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.
Title: A Dissertation Upon Parties: in Several Letters to Caleb D'Anvers, Esq.
Publication Info: London: Printed for R. Francklin, 1749.
Edition: Seventh edition; xxxix, 322 pages, [1] leaf of plates.
Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library
Listed in the Jefferson Inventory as [Bolingbroke]'s Dissertation on parties. 8vo. and given by Thomas Jefferson to his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph. It later appears on Randolph's 1832 estate inventory as "'Dissertation on parties' ($1.50 value)." We cannot determine the precise edition Wythe owned from the information available. Brown's Bibliography[8] lists the 8th edition (1754) based on the copy Jefferson sold to the Library of Congress.[9] George Wythe's Library[10] on LibraryThing includes no specific edition.
Description of the Wolf Law Library's copy
Bound in full contemporary calf, gilt spine with orange and black lettering pieces, marbled endpapers and all edges marbled. Contains engraved frontispiece and woodcut initials and tail pieces. Purchased from Gibb's Bookshop ABA.
View this book in William & Mary's online catalog.
References
- ↑ Caroline Robbins, “‘Discordant Parties’: A Study of the Acceptance of Party Englishmen,” Political Science Quarterly 73 (1958): 505-529.
- ↑ H. T. Dickinson, "St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751)" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004- ), accessed 11 Oct 2013]
- ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. "Henry Saint John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke," accessed October 02, 2013, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/72043/Henry-Saint-John-1st-Viscount-Bolingbroke-Baron-Saint-John-of-Lydiard-Tregoze.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Robbins, “‘Discordant Parties’: A Study of the Acceptance of Party Englishmen."
- ↑ Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, '"Republicanism: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 2002), 41.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Bennie Brown, "The Library of George Wythe of Williamsburg and Richmond," (unpublished manuscript, May, 2012) Microsoft Word file. Earlier edition available at: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/13433
- ↑ E. Millicent Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 3:132 [no.2734].
- ↑ LibraryThing, s. v. "Member: George Wythe," accessed on June 28, 2013, http://www.librarything.com/profile/GeorgeWythe
