Richard Price

Richard Price 1723-91, English nonconformist minister and philosopher. His philosophical importance rests on his ethical discussion, Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1757), in which Price stresses the power of reason in making moral judgments, a position closely allied to that of Kant. He achieved fame with his sponsorship of the American colonists' cause in a pamphlet called Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776). He also defended the French Revolution and was subsequently criticized by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Price's writings on governmental finance were also well known.

Bibliography: See studies by C. B. Cone (1952) and W. D. Hudson (1970).

Price, Richard (1723–91), Nonconformist minister, moral and political philosopher. In A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) he defended a view of ethical action which had affinities with the teaching later expounded by I. Kant. He held that the rightness and wrongness of an action belonged to it intrinsically and criticized the ‘moral sense’ view of ethics. By 1778 he was a Unitarian.

Price, Richard (1723–91), a Dissenting minister who became, with his friend Joseph Priestley, one of the original members of the Unitarian Society in 1791; he was from 1758 minister at Newington Green, which had been a centre of Dissent for many years, where he influenced many younger writers, including S. Rogers and M. Wollstonecraft. He published in 1756 his best-known work, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, in which he questions Hutcheson's doctrine of ‘moral sense’. He was a close friend of Franklin, and supported the cause of American independence; he also supported the French Revolution, and his sermon delivered on 4 Nov. 1789, celebrating ‘the ardour for liberty’ of the French, provoked Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France.