Ryan Patrick Hanley
Biographic Data
| ID | 482045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryan Patrick Hanley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ryan Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanley |
| SIGNATURE | HANLEY R P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Marquette University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2077-708X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Adam Smith on Social Progress and the Evolution of Love
Adam Smith is not generally considered a pioneering theorist of love. To the degree that scholars have attended to his treatment of love, they have tended to focus on his critical comments on love and sex in The Theory of Moral Sentiments . This article, in contrast, focuses on Smith’s comparatively understudied treatment of love in the Lectures on Jurisprudence to argue that the lectures set forth a sophisticated theory of the ways in which the …
Adam Smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the death of nations
The Philosophical Tradition
Defoe was not a philosopher, yet his work demands attention from a philosophical perspective for two reasons. One is contextual. Defoe’s literary career in the first quarter of the eighteenth century coincided with a remarkable period in the history of British philosophy. Second, Defoe frequently takes up themes addressed by the major philosophers of his day, and thus familiarity with their central concerns and arguments will be helpful to his re…
A Philosopher's Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism
The human good and the science of man
David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as preeminent contributors to the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘science of man.’ For our understanding of Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to this project, scholars today are especially indebted to Nicholas Phillipson, who influentially and persuasively demonstrated how the science of man that they developed sought to account for social progress as the result of man’s natural love of improvement in the …
‘The Happiest and Most Honourable Period of My Life’: Adam Smith’s Service to the University of Glasgow
Justice and Politics in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
Hume’s signature contribution to the theory of justice has long been taken to consist in the Treatise’s argument for justice as an artificial virtue. Yet Hume’s re-presentation of his theory of justice in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals makes no reference whatsoever to justice as an artificial virtue. Given this fundamental difference, interpreters are compelled to explain what exactly changed in Hume’s shift from one sort of acco…
L’éducation du prince selon Fénelon: De l’amour-propre à la justice
Auteur de Télémaque , Fénelon est peut-être le contributeur le plus important au genre « miroirs aux princes » en France dans la période moderne. Mais son livre célébré par tout le monde comme un exemple classique de ce genre n’est pas la contribution la plus importante de Fénelon à ce genre. Cet honneur est réservé à un autre texte : l’ Examen de conscience sur les devoirs de la royauté . Cet article présente quelques réflexions sur ce texte oub…
Rousseau's three revolutions
Rousseau's relation to the French Revolution – and in particular his status as the Revolution's precursor or predictor or progenitor – has been often examined. Yet almost no sustained attention has been given to what is arguably Rousseau's most significant and explicit statement on revolution and its role in civilization's development. This paper calls attention to this statement and argues for its key significance on three fronts: first, for how…
Reply to my critics
This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relationship of past ideas to present politics, the utility of ideological labels in the history of political thought, and the relationship of political philosophy to religion and theology
Distance Learning: Political Education in the Persian Letters
Montesquieu's Persian Letters offers a remarkable guide into the methods and substance of political education, and especially political education at a distance. In two particular series of epistolary exchanges between distant letter writers and recipients we are shown a talented educator in action, one especially adept on two fronts. First, in these exchanges Usbek shows himself to be uniquely sensitive to the concerns of his interlocutors. Secon…
Adam Smith by Craig Smith
Book Review| August 01 2021 Adam Smith by Craig Smith Adam Smith. By Smith, Craig. London: Polity, 2020. 240 pp. $24.95. Ryan Patrick Hanley Ryan Patrick Hanley Boston College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2021) 53 (4): 793–795. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-9309009 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook T…
The Political Philosophy of Fénelon
Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon’s political thought, it has three primary aims.…
Political Philosophy of Fénelon
"Fe nelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fe nelon's political thought, it has three prima…
The Adventures of Telemachus (selections)
Telemachus , first published in 1699, was the centerpiece of Fénelon’s education for Burgundy. Its initial publication is said to be owed to the theft of the manuscript by an unfaithful copyist. But it soon became a publishing phenomenon and a principal source of Fénelon’s enduring fame. For students of moral and political philosophy, it is important not only for its allegorical critique of the absolutism of Louis XIV, but also for its articulati…
Fables (selections): [Pl. 1:175–275]
The Fables are drawn from several short texts that Fénelon’s editors have previously gathered under the title Fables et opuscules pédagogiques . They comprise a range of writings that Fénelon composed for the political education of the Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV and Petit Dauphin , during his tenure as court tutor. Important contributions to a genre pioneered by Aesop and La Fontaine, they have long been regarded as significant liter…
Prudence, or On Education
Chapter 1 examines Fénelon’s contributions as an educator. It focuses on four texts indispensable to appreciating the methods and aims of his masterwork Telemachus . These include the book-length Dialogues on Eloquence and Education of Girls , and his shorter Letter to the Academy and “Advice on Education.” In interpreting these texts, it argues that fundamental to them—and indeed to Fénelon’s political philosophy as a whole—is Fénelon’s claim th…
Moderation, or On Economics
Chapter 2 offers an overview and interpretation of Fénelon’s economic thought. Contra those who have found in Fénelon a precursor to certain radical economic ideologies, it argues that attempting to understand his economic positions via such categories is mistaken. Fénelon in fact stakes out substantively moderate economic positions on three fronts: his belief that the proper end of political economy is sufficiency and not austerity, his emphasis…
Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings
Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon’s works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has a…
Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life
Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and interpretation from the eighteenth century to the present, edited by Avi Lifschitz
An old quip (which I first heard from Robert Wokler, one of the last century’s great Rousseau scholars) has it that Napoleon justified his reign by taking recourse to Rousseau’s principles – he jus
Fénelon’s Telemachus
This paper examines three aspects of the treatment of the relationship of love to virtue in François Fénelon’s Telemachus. As one of the great French intellectual figures of the early eighteenth century, Fenelon was at first admired but then banished from the royal court. This was largely because of Telemachus, an imagined narrative of the prince’s search for his wandering father, Ulysses, during which he absorbs many moral and political lessons.…
Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy
Adam Smith on the ‘Natural Principles of Religion’
Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the m…
Kant’s Sexual Contract
Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illu…
Commerce and Corruption: Rousseau's Diagnosis and Adam Smith's Cure
Modern commercial society has been criticized for attenuating virtue and inhibiting the ethical self-realization of its participants. But Adam Smith, a founding father of liberal commercial modernity, anticipated precisely this critique and took specific measures to circumvent it. This article presents these measures via an analysis of his response to the critique of liberal commercial modernity set forth by Rousseau. It principally argues that S…
Enlightened Nation Building: The “Science of the Legislator” in Adam Smith and Rousseau
Rousseau is famous as an advocate of the politics of “denaturing.” But attention to his conception of the “science of the legislator,” as developed in the Geneva Manuscript and his writings on Poland and Corsica, reveals a more moderate approach to statecraft. Here Rousseau claims that legislative science requires tempering commitment to principles of political right with sensitivity to actual political conditions—a claim that importantly and une…
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. By Joshua Foa Dienstag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 314p. $35.00.This stimulating book has two aims, one descriptive and one normative. Its first goal is to provide an “appraisal” of pessimism and recover it “as an important tradition in the history of political thought” alongside more familiar -isms. Its second goal is to offer an “endorsement” of this neglected tradition and “reanimate” it …
"The "Wisdom of the State: Adam Smith on China and Tartary
Adam Smith's engagement with China and Tartary is a central yet underappreciated element of his economic and political thought. This article reconstructs this engagement and demonstrates its broader significance, arguing that it focuses on three themes: the economic institutions that promote domestic growth in a manner that alleviates the material conditions of the poorest, the social and political conditions that minimize the dependence of the p…
Political Science and Political Understanding: Isaiah Berlin on the Nature of Political Inquiry
I saiah Berlin is remembered for his positive/negative liberty distinction and his value pluralism, but he was also an active participant in the debate over the nature of political inquiry. This essay argues that his neglected contribution to this debate is central to his thought and a valuable resource in today's debate over political science's methods and ends. I first show how Berlin understood the relationship of empirical science to humanist…
David Hume and the “Politics of Humanity
Recently a call has gone up for a revival of the “politics of humanity.” But what exactly is the “politics of humanity”? For illumination this paper turns to Hume’s analysis of humanity’s foundational role in morality and modern politics. Its aims in so doing are twofold. First, it aims to set forth a new understanding of the unity of Hume’s practical and epistemological projects in developing his justifications for and the implications of his re…
Adam Smith on the ‘Natural Principles of Religion’
Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the m…
Kant’s Sexual Contract
Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illu…
Social Science and Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlightenment and Today
The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation …
Hume's Last Lessons: The Civic Education of My Own Life
Hume's concern to promote public virtue is a central element of his philosophical project which deserves more attention than it has received. This article examines one of his most focused efforts at public moralism: his largely forgotten autobiography, My Own Life . By attending to its account of how Hume employed his vanity and ambition in his pursuit of fame and fortune—and discovered such virtues as temperance, industry, moderation, and indepe…
Political Science and Political Understanding: Isaiah Berlin on the Nature of Political Inquiry
I saiah Berlin is remembered for his positive/negative liberty distinction and his value pluralism, but he was also an active participant in the debate over the nature of political inquiry. This essay argues that his neglected contribution to this debate is central to his thought and a valuable resource in today's debate over political science's methods and ends. I first show how Berlin understood the relationship of empirical science to humanist…
David Hume and the Modern Problem of Honor
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. By Joshua Foa Dienstag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 314p. $35.00.This stimulating book has two aims, one descriptive and one normative. Its first goal is to provide an “appraisal” of pessimism and recover it “as an important tradition in the history of political thought” alongside more familiar -isms. Its second goal is to offer an “endorsement” of this neglected tradition and “reanimate” it …
Commerce and Corruption: Rousseau's Diagnosis and Adam Smith's Cure
Modern commercial society has been criticized for attenuating virtue and inhibiting the ethical self-realization of its participants. But Adam Smith, a founding father of liberal commercial modernity, anticipated precisely this critique and took specific measures to circumvent it. This article presents these measures via an analysis of his response to the critique of liberal commercial modernity set forth by Rousseau. It principally argues that S…
Enlightened Nation Building: The “Science of the Legislator” in Adam Smith and Rousseau
Rousseau is famous as an advocate of the politics of “denaturing.” But attention to his conception of the “science of the legislator,” as developed in the Geneva Manuscript and his writings on Poland and Corsica, reveals a more moderate approach to statecraft. Here Rousseau claims that legislative science requires tempering commitment to principles of political right with sensitivity to actual political conditions—a claim that importantly and une…
Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue
Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure …
Social Science and Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlightenment and Today
The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation …
David Hume and the “Politics of Humanity
Recently a call has gone up for a revival of the “politics of humanity.” But what exactly is the “politics of humanity”? For illumination this paper turns to Hume’s analysis of humanity’s foundational role in morality and modern politics. Its aims in so doing are twofold. First, it aims to set forth a new understanding of the unity of Hume’s practical and epistemological projects in developing his justifications for and the implications of his re…
Capitalism's Two Cultures
Kant’s Sexual Contract
Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illu…
"The "Wisdom of the State: Adam Smith on China and Tartary
Adam Smith's engagement with China and Tartary is a central yet underappreciated element of his economic and political thought. This article reconstructs this engagement and demonstrates its broader significance, arguing that it focuses on three themes: the economic institutions that promote domestic growth in a manner that alleviates the material conditions of the poorest, the social and political conditions that minimize the dependence of the p…
Adam Smith on the ‘Natural Principles of Religion’
Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the m…
Fénelon’s Telemachus
This paper examines three aspects of the treatment of the relationship of love to virtue in François Fénelon’s Telemachus. As one of the great French intellectual figures of the early eighteenth century, Fenelon was at first admired but then banished from the royal court. This was largely because of Telemachus, an imagined narrative of the prince’s search for his wandering father, Ulysses, during which he absorbs many moral and political lessons.…
Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy
Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life
Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and interpretation from the eighteenth century to the present, edited by Avi Lifschitz
An old quip (which I first heard from Robert Wokler, one of the last century’s great Rousseau scholars) has it that Napoleon justified his reign by taking recourse to Rousseau’s principles – he jus
The Political Philosophy of Fénelon
Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon’s political thought, it has three primary aims.…
Political Philosophy of Fénelon
"Fe nelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fe nelon's political thought, it has three prima…
The Adventures of Telemachus (selections)
Telemachus , first published in 1699, was the centerpiece of Fénelon’s education for Burgundy. Its initial publication is said to be owed to the theft of the manuscript by an unfaithful copyist. But it soon became a publishing phenomenon and a principal source of Fénelon’s enduring fame. For students of moral and political philosophy, it is important not only for its allegorical critique of the absolutism of Louis XIV, but also for its articulati…
Fables (selections): [Pl. 1:175–275]
The Fables are drawn from several short texts that Fénelon’s editors have previously gathered under the title Fables et opuscules pédagogiques . They comprise a range of writings that Fénelon composed for the political education of the Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV and Petit Dauphin , during his tenure as court tutor. Important contributions to a genre pioneered by Aesop and La Fontaine, they have long been regarded as significant liter…
Prudence, or On Education
Chapter 1 examines Fénelon’s contributions as an educator. It focuses on four texts indispensable to appreciating the methods and aims of his masterwork Telemachus . These include the book-length Dialogues on Eloquence and Education of Girls , and his shorter Letter to the Academy and “Advice on Education.” In interpreting these texts, it argues that fundamental to them—and indeed to Fénelon’s political philosophy as a whole—is Fénelon’s claim th…
Moderation, or On Economics
Chapter 2 offers an overview and interpretation of Fénelon’s economic thought. Contra those who have found in Fénelon a precursor to certain radical economic ideologies, it argues that attempting to understand his economic positions via such categories is mistaken. Fénelon in fact stakes out substantively moderate economic positions on three fronts: his belief that the proper end of political economy is sufficiency and not austerity, his emphasis…
Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings
Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon’s works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has a…
‘The Happiest and Most Honourable Period of My Life’: Adam Smith’s Service to the University of Glasgow
Philosophy (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (10 works)