Reviews of Books

The Learned Class of the Eighteenth Century

Sibley's Harvard Graduates, Volume XVIII: 1772–1774. By Conrad Edick Wright and Edward W. Hanson. Massachusetts Historical Society. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Pp. xxxiv, 565. $50.00.)

Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America. By Brandon Brame Fortune and Deborah J. Warner. An Exhibition of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, April 16-September 6, 1999. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 178. $34.95.)

The Life of Benjamin Banneker: The First African-American Man of Science. By Silvio A. Bedini. Second edition, revised and expanded. (Baltimore: The Maryland Historical Society, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 428. $35.00.)

When John Adams sought to define the "natural aristocracy" of eighteenth-century America, he gave a prominent place to learning. That elite consisted of "all those who have received a liberal education" or who possessed an "ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences," regardless of wealth or family status.1 So Adams, the first in his family to attend college, liked to think. Yet his statement was more than a wish. Seldom in American history has high culture—the knowledge of intellectuals—influenced and informed public opinion as powerfully as it did in the epoch of enlightenment and revolution. Although not everyone subscribed to the new learning (even among the learned), this was an era when statesmen took seriously the ideas of philosophes, and the latest theories about nature and man shaped political discourse. To study the period is to gain an uncommon opportunity to join political history and intellectual history.	1
Traditionally, such fusion has been attempted through biographies of famous scientists, scholars, and statesmen. More recently, historians have begun to examine the institutions, discourses, and practices of the learned associated with the "public sphere." But who exactly were the learned of the eighteenth century? What, aside from their intellectual expertise, distinguished them from less educated neighbors? How, in practical terms, did the ideals of enlightenment inspire and influence their lives and careers?	2
The publication of the first two volumes of Patriot-Improvers, a record of the members of the American Philosophical Society (APS) and its parent organizations up to 1769, and the most recent volume of Sibley's Harvard Graduates, covering the classes of 1772–1774, afford an occasion to address these issues and to explore the collective biography of early American intellectuals.	. . .