Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, was an English politician, philosopher and writer, born in London in 1671 and dead at Naples in 1713. He belonged to the Cambridge Platonist tradition and is regarded as one of the main voices of the British Enlightenment. His central claim was that human beings are not moved by self-interest alone, but carry a natural inclination towards the good.

He was educated early under the supervision of John Locke, who oversaw his studies according to the principles of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and he learned Latin and Greek. He later attended Winchester College and set out on a tour of the continent. After the Glorious Revolution he returned to England and in 1695 was elected to Parliament for the Whigs. He gave up the seat in 1698 because his health, weakened by asthma, would not allow him to continue. He then held the post of vice-admiral of Dorset, which he lost when Queen Anne came to the throne, and he moved between England and the Netherlands. Eventually his health took him to Italy in 1711, and he died there two years later.

His main works appeared mainly between 1699 and 1711. An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, first written in 1699, laid the groundwork for his thought, and the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, published in 1711, gathered much of his writing. His ethics rests on a moral sense, an innate faculty that leads us to judge actions and to love virtue through sympathy with the order of the universe. For him the good and the beautiful are one and the same concept, and taste is a refined sensibility that can be educated and comes close to moral conscience. His ideal of balance and harmony, drawing on Alberti, also shaped his view of the arts.

His influence reached Britain, the France of the Enlightenment, where Diderot read him closely, and German classicism, from Herder to Goethe.