The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin

Too often dismissed as the least philosophic of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin had a deep and lasting impact on the shape of American political thought. In this substantial collection of Franklin’s letters, essays, and lesser-known papers, Ralph Ketcham traces the development of Franklin’s practical–and distinctly American–political thought from his earliest Silence Dogood essays to his final writings on the Constitution and The Evils of the Slave Trade.