Primary Sources

The most comprehensive collection of Shaftesbury’s writings is Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, edited by Wolfram Benda et al., Stuttgard-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981–present. Information on the Standard Edition can be found at: http://www.dozenten.anglistik/phil.uni-erlangen.de/shaftesbury/standard.html.

For detailed lists of all of Shaftesbury’s writings—published, unpublished and in translation—see:

• The Shaftesbury Project
• Selected Bibliography by Laurent Jaffro

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times

Recent editions:

• Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited and with an introduction by Philip Ayers (in two volumes), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. This edition includes A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules and A Letter concerning Design. (Scholar)
• Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited and with an introduction by Laurence E. Klein (in one volume), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• [C] Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, with a forward by Douglas Den Uyl (in three volumes), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. This edition includes A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules. Liberty Fund edition available online (Scholar)

Characteristicks comprises six works. Versions of the first five (but not of the concluding Miscelleneous Reflections) were published earlier:

• An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, in two Discourses, 1699.
• A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 1708.
• The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, 1709.
• Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, 1709.
• Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author, 1710.

Other notable works by Shaftesbury

• Askemata, Standard Edition II,6, edited by Wolfram Benda et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011.
• Second Characters, Standard Edition I,5, edited by Wolfram Benda et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2001.
• “Preface” in Select Sermons of Dr Whichcot. In Two Parts, London, 1698. (Scholar)
• Paradoxes of State, Relating to the Present Juncture of Affairs in England and the Rest of Europe, London, 1702.
• A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules, London, 1713.
• “A Letter concerning Design.” The Present State of the Republick of Letters, February 1728, pp. 93–106. (Scholar)
• Chartae Socraticae: Design of a Socratick History Standard Edition II, 5, edited by Wolfram Benda et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2007.
• Pathologia, in “Pathologia, a Theory of the Passions,” translated and edited by Laurent Jaffro, Christian Maurer, and Alain Petit, History of European Ideas, 39 (2013): 221–240. (Scholar)
• The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Author of the “Characteristics”, edited by Benjamin Rand, London/New York, 1900, 1–272. (Scholar)

Secondary Sources

Extensive bibliographies of works on Shaftesbury can be found at:

• Reception of Shaftesbury’s Works 1700–1850
• Shaftesbury Scholarship 1850 to present day
• Bibliographie des études relatives

The following are works referenced in this entry:

• Amir, Lydia, 2016, “Shaftesbury as Popperian: Critical Rationalism? Part 1,” Analiza I Egzystencja, 35: 5–21. (Scholar)
• Annas, Julia, 2008, “Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism,” in Morality and Self-Interest, Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 205–221. (Scholar)
• Arreguie, Jorge V. and Arnau, Pablo, 1994, “Shaftesbury: Father or Critic of Modern Aesthetics?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 34(4): 350–62. (Scholar)
• xelsson, Karl, 2019, Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society, London: Bloomsbury Academic. (Scholar)
• Barker-Benfield, G.J. 1992, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: Chicago University Press. (Scholar)
• Bernstein, John Andrew, 1977, “Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good with the Beautiful,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 10: 304–325. (Scholar)
• Boeker, Ruth, 2018, “Shaftesbury on Persons, Personhood, and Character Development,” Philosophy Compass, 13(1): e12471. doi:10.1111/phc3.12471 (Scholar)
• –––, 2019, “Shaftesbury on Liberty and Self-Mastery,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27(5): 1–22. doi:10.1080/09672559.2019.1674362 (Scholar)
• Branch, Lori, 2006, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, Waco: Baylor University Press. (Scholar)
• Brown, John, 1765, Essays on the Characteristics, London: C. Davis. (Scholar)
• Brown, Leslie Ellen, 1995, “The Idea of Life as a Work of Art in Scottish Enlightenment Discourse,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 24: 51–67. (Scholar)
• Carey, Daniel, 2006, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Carroll, Ross, 2018, “Ridicule, Censorship, and the Regulation of Public Speech: The Case of Shaftesbury,” Modern Intellectual History, 15(2): 353–380. (Scholar)
• Cassirer, Ernest, 1953, The Platonic Renaissance in England, translated by James P. Pettegrove, Austin: University of Texas Press. (Scholar)
• Chaves, Joseph, 2008, “Philosophy and Politeness, Moral Autonomy and Malleability in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics”, in Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature, Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton (eds.), London: Pickering and Chatto: 51–68. (Scholar)
• Crisp, Roger, 2019, Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-Interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Darwall, Stephen, 1995, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Dehrmann, Mark-Georg, 2014, “’Pedagogy of the Eye’ in Shaftesbury’s Second Characters,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 45–60. (Scholar)
• Den Uyl, D.J., 1998, “Shaftesbury and the Modern Problem of Virtue,” Social Philosophy and Policy Journal, 15: 275–316. (Scholar)
• Driver, Julia, 2014, “The History of Utilitarianism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/>. (Scholar)
• Filonowicz, Joseph Duke, 1989, “Ethical Sentimentalism Revisited,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 6(2): 189–206. (Scholar)
• –––, 2008, Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Fleming, Suzannah, 2014, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: Practical Gardener and Husbandman,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 93–114. (Scholar)
• Gatti, Andrea, 2014, “The Aesthetic Mind: Stoic Influences on Shaftesbury’s Theory of Beauty,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 61–76. (Scholar)
• Gill, Michael B., 2000, “Shaftesbury’s Two Accounts of the Reason to be Virtuous,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38: 529–48. (Scholar)
• –––, 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014, “Shaftesbury on Politeness, Honesty, and the Reason to be Moral,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 167–84. (Scholar)
• –––, 2020, “Shaftesbury on Selfishness and Partisanship,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 37(1): 55–79. (Scholar)
• –––, 2021, “Shaftesbury’s Claim the Beauty and Good are One and the Same,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 59: 69–92. (Scholar)
• Glauser, Richard, 2002, “Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 76: 25–54. (Scholar)
• Grean, Stanley, 1967, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. (Scholar)
• Grote, Simon, 2010, “Shaftesbury’s Egoistic Hedonism,” Aufklärung, 22: 135–49. (Scholar)
• Hume, David, 1739–40/2007, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford Clarendon Press. (Scholar)
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1726/2004, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Wolfgang Leidhold (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. (Scholar)
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1742/2002, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. (Scholar)
• Irwin, Terence, 2008, The Development of Ethics: Volume 2: From Suarez to Rousseau, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2015, “Shaftesbury’s place in the history of moral realism,” Philosophical Studies, 182: 865–882. (Scholar)
• Jaffro, Laurent, 2007, “Berkeley’s Criticism of Shaftesbury’s Moral Theory in Alciphron, III” in Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, Stephen H. Daniel (ed.), Toronto: Toronto University Press, 199–213. (Scholar)
• –––, 2008, “Shaftesbury on the ‘Natural Secretion’ and Philosophical Personae,” Intellectual History Review, 18: 349–59. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014, “Cyrus’ Strategy: Shaftesbury on Human Frailty and the Will,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 153–166. (Scholar)
• –––, 2018, “Psychological and Political Balances: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Reading of James Harrington,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 149–162. (Scholar)
• Jost, Jacob Sider, 2018, “Party Politics in Characteristicks,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 135–148. (Scholar)
• Klein, Lawrence E, 1994, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Klein, Lawrence E., 2004, “Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Kivy, Peter, 2003, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Leatherbarrow, D., 1984, “Character, Geometry, and Perspective: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Principles of Garden Design”, Journal of Garden History, 4: 332–58. (Scholar)
• Lepper, Mark, Greene, David, and Nisbett, Richard E., 1973, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28: 129–137. (Scholar)
• Levy-Eichel, Mordechai, 2020, “‘The moral arithmetic’: morality in the age of mathematics,” Intellectual History Review, 31(2): 267–282. (Scholar)
• Liu, Yu. 2004. “The Possibility of a Different Theodicy: The Chinese ‘Scharawadgi’ and Shaftesbury’s Aesthetics and Ethics,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 42(2): 213–36. (Scholar)
• ––– 2008, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal, New York: Columbia University Press. (Scholar)
• Lund, Roger, 2012, Ridicule, Religion, and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. (Scholar)
• McAteer, John. 2016. “Silencing Theodicy with Enthusiasm: Aesthetic Experience as a Response to the Problem of Evil in Shaftesbury, Annie Dillard, and the Book of Job,” The Heythrop Journal, 57(5): 788–95. (Scholar)
• Marshall, David, 1986, The Figure of the Theatre in Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot, New York: Columbia University Press. (Scholar)
• Martineau, James, 1886, Types of Ethical Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Scholar)
• Mijuskovic, Ben, 1971, “Hume and Shaftesbury on the Self,” Philosophical Quarterly, 21: 324–36. (Scholar)
• Maurer, Christian and Laurent Jaffro, 2013, “Reading Shaftesbury’s Pathologia: An Illustration and Defence of the Stoic Account of the Emotions,” History of European Ideas, 39: 207–20. (Scholar)
• Mortensen, Preben, 1994, “Shaftesbury and the Morality of Art Appreciation,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 55: 631–50. (Scholar)
• Müller, Patrick, 2010a, “‘Dwell with honesty & beauty & order’: The Paradox of Theodicy in Shaftesbury’s Thought,” Aufklärung, 22: 201–31. (Scholar)
• –––, 2010b, “Shaftesbury on the Psychoanalyst’s Couch: A Historicist Perspective on Gender and (Homo)Sexuality in Characteristicks and the Ear’s Private Writings,” Swift Studies, 25: 56–81. (Scholar)
• –––, 2012, “Rewriting the Divine Right Theory for the Whigs: The Political Implications of Shaftesbury’s Attack on the Doctrine of Futurity in his Characteristicks,” in Great Expectations: Futurity in the Long Eighteenth Century, Mascha Hansen and Jürgen Klein (eds.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 67–88. (Scholar)
• –––, 2013, “Mapping a Tory’s ‘prostitute Pen and Tongue’: Satire, Criticism, and the Political Dimension of Shaftesbury’s Aversion to Swift,” in “The first wit of the age”: Essays on Swift and his Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real, Mascha Hansen, Kirsten Juhas, and Patrick Müller (eds.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 297–314. (Scholar)
• –––, 2014a, “Hobbes, Locke and the Consequences: Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense and Political Agitation in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 37: 315–330. (Scholar)
• –––, 2018, “‘An Equal Commonwealth: Lord Ashley and the Republican Project of the 1690s,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 115–134. (Scholar)
• Myers, Katherine, 2010, “Shaftesbury, Pope, and Original Sacred Nature,” Garden History, 39: 3–19. (Scholar)
• –––, 2017, “‘Wise Substitute of Providence: The third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Stoic Philosophy of Nature in Estate Gardening,” Garden History, 45(2): 193–212. (Scholar)
• Paknadel, Félix, 1974, “Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37: 290–312. (Scholar)
• Peach, B.A., 1958, “Shaftesbury’s Moral Arithmeticks,” The Personalist, 39: 19–27. (Scholar)
• Price, Richard, 1769, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, London: D. Cadell. (Scholar)
• Prince, M.B., 1996, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Purviance, Susan M., 2004, “Shaftesbury on Self as a Practice,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2: 154–163. (Scholar)
• Raphael, D.D., 1947, The Moral Sense, London: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Rind, Miles, 2002, “The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40: 67–87. (Scholar)
• Rivers, Isabel, 2000a, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780—Shaftesbury to Hume, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• –––, 2000b, “Review of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Philip Ayres (ed.),” Review of English Studies, 51: 617–21. (Scholar)
• Savile, Anthony, 2002, “Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 76: 55–74. (Scholar)
• Schneewind, J.B., 1998, The Invention of Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Sellars, John, 2016, “Shaftesbury, Stoicism, and Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Sophia, 55: 395–408. (Scholar)
• Sidgwick, Henry, 1902, Outlines of the History of Ethics, London: Macmillan. (Scholar)
• Spellman, William M., 1988, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Stolnitz, Jerome, 1961a, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly, 43: 97–113. (Scholar)
• –––, 1961b, “‘Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 185–204. (Scholar)
• –––, 1961c, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20: 131–43. (Scholar)
• Stuart-Buttle, Tim, 2019, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Taylor, C., 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Scholar)
• Thiel, U., 2011, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Person Identity from Descartes to Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Tierney-Hynes, Rebecca, 2005, “Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy: Authorship and the Psychology of Romance,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 38(4): 605–621. (Scholar)
• Tiffany, Esther A, 1923, “Shaftesbury as Stoic,” Publications of the Modern Languages Association, 38(3): 642–685. (Scholar)
• Townsend, Dabney, 1982, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41: 205–13. (Scholar)
• Trianosky, Gregory W., 1978, “On the Obligation to be Virtuous: Shaftesbury and the Question, Why be Moral?” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16: 289–300. (Scholar)
• Trumbach, Randolph, 1998, Sex and the Gender Revolution, volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Scholar)
• Tuveson, Ernest, 1948, “The Origins of the ‘Moral Sense’,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 11: 241–59. (Scholar)
• –––, 1960, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism, Berkeley: University of California Press. (Scholar)
• Uehlein, Friedrich A., 2017, “Whichcote, Shaftesbury and Locke: Shaftesbury’s Critique of Locke’s Epistemology and Moral Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25(5): 1031–1048. (Scholar)
• Voitle, Robert B., 1984, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. (Scholar)
• White, David, 1973, “The Metaphysics of Disinterestedness: Shaftesbury and Kant,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 32(2): 239–248. (Scholar)
• Wiley, Basil, 1940, The Eighteenth Century Background, New York: Columbia University Press. (Scholar)
• Williams, Abigail, 2005, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Scholar)
• Winkler, Kenneth P., 2000, “‘All is Revolution in Us’: Personal Identity in Shaftesbury and Hume,” Hume Studies, 26: 3–40. (Scholar)
• Woldt, Isabella, “Hercules at the Crossroads: Shaftesbury’s Concept of Freedom, Neuroscience, and Compatibilism,” in New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in his World and Today, Patrick Müller (ed.), Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 131–152. (Scholar)