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Richard Price, 1723-1791 |
Richard Price was a mathematician, an expert on insurance, and an advisor to Shelburne and Pitt on financial reform. He was also one of the leaders of the Dissenting campaigns to extend he rights of freedom of worship and of civic equality. Although Price is little known today outside the province of the 18th century specialist, his importance today is as the author of A Discourse on the Love of Our County, the work which prompted Edmund Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France and initiate the pamphlet war of the 1790s. See the following works of Price: | The History Guide | | copyright © 2000 Steven Kreis |
The Welsh moral and political philosopher was born at Tynton,
Glamorganshire, went to a Dissenting academy in London, was preacher at Newington Green
and Hackney (outer London), and established a reputation by his Review of the
Principal Questions in Morals (1756) and Importance of Christianity (1766).
In 1769, he was made D.D. by Glasgow, and published the celebrated Northampton
Mortality Tables. In 1771, appeared his Appeal on the National Debt and in
1776 his Observations on Civil Liberty and the War with America. The Observations
brought him an invitation from the United States Congress to assist in regulating its
finances. In his great treatise on morals he held that right and wrong are simple ideas
incapable of analysis, and received immediately by the intuitive power of the reason. In
1791, Price became an original member of the Unitarian Society.