Differentiating a Republican Citizenry: Talents, Human Science, and Enlightenment Theories of Governance

Abstract

This essay explores how the Enlightenment preoccupation with nature and reason, and the concomitant desire to restructure civil and political society according to these principles, served simultaneously to write certain speculations within mental philosophy into the heart of the republican project and to orient the emerging human sciences toward embracing those social formations most consonant with the developing notions of the republican citizen and the enlightened society. Using the development of the language of talents in the eighteenth century as its focus, the essay examines how Enlightenment political writers and mental philosophers--including Locke, Hartley, Condillac, Cabanis, Rousseau, Helvetius, Godwin, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, and Adams--elaborated a vision, on the one hand, of a new social-political order founded on merit and, on the other, of human nature as an object of both scientific and political interest.