Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture

This is an interdisciplinary collection of comparative essays which look at aspects of the thought of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin and consider the place of these two men in American culture. The essays have their origin in a conference held at Yale University, the home of the modern editions of the papers of both these 18th century American thinkers. Franklin and Edwards are probably the two most studied colonial figures and have often been the subject of comparative exercises. In such studies, they have often been treated as having the characteristics of mutually exclusive ideal types and set into categories as different and opposed as `traditional' and `modern.' In the present volume, however, polemical contrasts disappear and Edwards and Franklin emerge as contrapuntal themes in a larger unity.