Price, Richard, 1723-1791

Person

Price, Richard, 1723-1791

Richard Price, Dissenting minister, mathematician, political philosopher, and demographer, was born in Llangeinor, Glamorgan, the son of Dissenting minister Rees Price (1673-1739). He received his first education at home, then at Neath and Pen-twyn, Carmarthenshire, followed by a short period at an academy run by Independent minister and teacher Vavasor Griffiths at Chancefield in Breconshire. Both his parents died while Price was still a very young man and he was sent to attend an academy at Tenter Alley, Moorfields, London, where he received an excellent grounding in mathematics and Newtonian physics. He left in 1744 and became family chaplain in the household of the wealthy Dissenter George Streatfield, who greatly influenced Price's religious and theological views. In 1758 Price was appointed pastor at the Presbyterian chapel at Newington Green and in the same year published A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals; this work set down Price's moral religious philosophy, which predated Kant in its maintenance that moral judgement was a function of reason rather than feeling or sentiment. In 1767, by this time preaching at the Gravel-Pit Meeting Place in Hackney, Price published his first theological work, entitled Four Dissertations. His theological view that the existence of God could be rationally demonstrated and that all things happen for a reason, i.e. the divine purpose, successfully accomodated Newtonian cosmology and united science and religion in one philosophical whole. Around 1766 Price embarked on his influential work with the Society for Equitable Assurances, which led to the publication in 1771 of Observations on Reversionary Payments amid his growing concern with issues relating to national debt and the adoption of a sinking fund. It was following the appearance of Observations ... that Price began his friendship with Sir William Petty, Earl of Shelburne and marquis of Lansdowne. Through Petty, Price entered the Bowood Group, an informal gathering of intellectuals and professional men who met at Petty's estate at Bowood; he would also join another influential group calling itself the Club of Honest Whigs, which met at London coffee-houses and was mostly comprised of leading London Dissenters. Price's political involvement was to come to the fore during the American War of Independence. In 1776 he published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, a pamphlet in defence of American patriots and, in 1784, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. His denunciation of the slave trade earned him many adversaries, as did his support of the French Revolution. The decade before Price's death saw the publication of his demographic treatise An Essay on the Population (1780) and the theological works Sermons on the Christian Doctrine and The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind (1787). His last publication, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), outlines Price's intrinsic belief in religious and political freedom. In recognition of his work as a political writer, Price was made a freeman of the City of London in 1776.