Houston’s position here recalls Steven Forde’s exploration of "the virtue of reasonableness" in the Autobiography; Forde, "Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Education of America," American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (June 1992): 357-68. Surprisingly few scholars have called attention to this vital aspect of Franklin’s thought-a fact that corroborates Houston’s initial assertion that we’ve never really understood Franklin at all.
2.
This decade has produced a number of excellent books on Franklin as political thinker, so this is saying a great deal. See especially Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), and-though it classifies Franklin a bit too neatly as a Lockean liberal democrat-Lorraine Smith Pangle, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
3.
Daniel T. Rodgers , "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History79, no. 1 (June 1992): 11-38.
