Benjamin Franklin's intellectual world

This volume contributes to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to trace the contours of certain aspects of Franklin's intellectual world and argues in fresh ways that Franklin was a thinker of profound depth. Several of the essays in this volume explore how Franklin's political and philosophical thinking was informed, while examining the deep appeal that Franklin has had on generation after generation of Americans.

Description based upon print version of record.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" / Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland -- Franklin's masks: a play upon possibility / Michael Zuckerman -- Benjamin Franklin unmasked / Jerry Weinberger -- Early modern imperialism, traditions of liberalism, and Franklin's ends of empire / Carla Mulford -- Benjamin Franklin, the mysterious "Charles de Weissenstein," and Britain's failure to coax revolutionary Americans back into the empire / Neil L. York -- Benjamin Franklin, student of the Holy Roman Empire: his summer journey to Germany in 1766 and his interest in the empire's federal constitution / Jürgen Overhoff -- Benjamin Franklin and the leather apron men: the politics of class in eighteenth-century Philadelphia / Simon P. Newman -- Recasting Franklin as printer: a note on recent historiography / Doug Thomas -- Benjamin Franklin, Richard Price, and the division of sacred and secular in the age of revolutions / Benjamin E. Park -- Ben Franklin and Socrates / Lorraine Smith Pangle -- From Weimar, with love: Benjamin Franklin's influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's self-fashioning / Paul E. Kerry -- Afterword: Benjamin Franklin's material presence in a digital age and p…