Politics and Economics

Despite the fact that Edwards never authored an extended or thorough commentary on political and economic matters, we can detect his assumptions and the general shape of his political and economic commentary scattered throughout his moral treatises, biblical commentary, miscellaneous observations, and sermons. A devoted subject of the Hanoverian monarchy, he presumed that Britain’s empire was the most laudable political system in the Atlantic world. Among other virtues, it served as a hedge against French Catholicism. He interpreted the meaning of that empire through Whig political agendas, which included a robust endorsement of Britain’s transatlantic commercial empire. Yet Edwards’s theological agendas often devalued political and commercial loyalties into contingent goods, subject to critique. He held that theological virtues had the power to minimize national identities in favour of worldwide Christian communion and universal benevolence.