The Downfall of All Slavish Hierarchies: Richard Price on Emancipation, Improvement, and Republican Utopia

• Published in: Modern intellectual history Vol. 19; no. 1; pp. 81 - 104
• Main Author: Elazar, Yiftah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.03.2022
• Subjects: 18th century; Christianity; Conversation; Narratives; Oppression; Plot (Narrative); Politics; Price, Richard (1949- ); Protestant Reformation; Religion; Utopias; France; Israel
• DOI: 10.1017/S1479244320000293
• ISSN: 1479-2443

Scholars have been paying increasing attention to the republican theory of liberty developed by the eighteenth-century British radical Richard Price. This article studies his narrative of a revolution of liberty, which consists in the downfall of oppressive powers, the establishment of republican institutions, and the introduction of a utopian age. In distinction from work that has focused on the millennial aspects of Price's narrative of emancipation, I highlight its political contexts and functions, situating its early development in utopian speculations about agrarian equality and population, demonstrating how the American Revolution had transformed it into a rallying cry for revolutionaries, and reconstructing its role as a source of politically mobilizing hope. This study differs from much of the scholarship on Price in looking beyond the Anglo-American context and presenting his work as part of a European conversation on the prospects of republican utopia, a conversation whose participants included Rousseau, Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet.