Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality

This book is a skilful examination of the thought of two apparently opposing personalities, Cotton Mather, the alternately tortured and punishing epitome of American Puritanism, and Benjamin Franklin, the liberal and affable American philosophe. This seeming opposition, however, is less an objective historical judgement than it is a continuing acceptance of Franklin's rhetoric. Though he promoted himself, his opinions, and his way of life as a release from the discipline Mather represented, Franklin owes a greater intellectual and emotional debt to Mather than he admits. According to Dr Breitweiser, Franklin's conception of a good life is a modernised and sophisticated version of Mather's, rather than a clean break from unreason to sanity. Dr Breitweiser also suggests that the continuity between Mather and Franklin can be extended to the larger question of the relationship between American Puritanism and the American Enlightenment, and that certain abiding questions about American identity are raised for the first time in the writings of these two brilliant early Americans.Breitweiser, Mitchell R. is the author of 'Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality', published 1985 under ISBN 9780521267687 and ISBN 0521267684.