The Society for Useful Knowledge
How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries brought the Enlightenment to America-an intellectual revolution that laid the foundation for the political one that followed. With the "first Drudgery" of settling the American colonies now past, Franklin announced in 1743, it was time the colonists set about improving the lot of humankind through collaborative inquiry. From Franklin's idea emerged the American Philosophical Society, an association hosted in Philadelphia and dedicated to the harnessing of man's intellectual and creative powers for the common good. The animus behind the society was and is a disarmingly simple one-that the value of knowledge is directly proportional to its utility. This straightforward idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself-and through America, on the world as a whole.
From celebrated historian of ideas Jonathan Lyons comes The Society for Useful Knowledge, telling the story of America's coming-of-age through its historic love affair with practical invention, applied science, and self-reliance. Offering fresh insights into such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the inimitable, endlessly inventive Franklin, Lyons gives us a vital new perspective on the American founding. He illustrates how the movement for useful knowledge is key to understanding the flow of American society and culture from colonial times to the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Benjamin Franklin famously counseled that knowledge is valuable in direct proportion to its utility. Unfortunately, Lyons's (The House of Wisdom) repetitive cultural history of a shopworn subject will be of little use to anyone at all familiar with the topic. Still, like Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, his approach is an engaging one by exploring ideas through the people who thought them, he adds substance to an otherwise airy discussion. Franklin, along with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, botanist John Bartram, and physician Benjamin Rush, all sought to foster utilitarian knowledge in hopes of enhancing the economic, political, and social character of colonial America. To that end, Franklin launched a kind of proto think tank in 1727 that "combined the conviviality of a private drinking club with the advantages of a mutual-aid society, the moral and intellectual self-improvement of a discussion circle, and the altruism of a civic association." Lyons's obvious and unsurprising conclusion is that these prescient thinkers secured the values of the "mechanic, artisan, engineer, and inventor in American society."
