The Deipnosophists and Dr Johnson

His admirers assert that the first English dictionary was Johnson’s but this is denied by antagonists who cite late medieval and early Renaissance lexicographers such as Thomas Elyot, Thomas Cooper and John Florio. The admirers emphasize Johnson’s merit above earlier authors and assert innovations to the form. This paper shows both views are limited and lexicography has a much greater antiquity seen in Athenaeus and earlier. All these works, which were composed over thousands of years, did not come from Evolution where Athenaeus is a common ancestor. Instead they are products of literary Spontaneous Generation, showing that Homo est animal grammaticum.

Laissez-Faire in the American Tradition

This chapter discusses liberal economic thought in the Southern and Northeastern discourses. Regional historical contexts account for the internal and trans-Atlantic divisions within antebellum liberal political economy. Southern free traders like John Calhoun and Thomas Cooper tied their brand of laissez-faire to a politically and economically inspired states’ rights and agrarian defense of slavery. In theoretically significant ways, Southerners divorced their version of free trade from Northeastern and British liberalism. Divisions widened as slavery was raised to the fore of domestic politics, and made permanent when British laissez-faire grew attached to industrialization. Northeastern free traders like Francis Wayland and John McVickar pursued a style of laissez-faire that comported with the Smithian tradition by focusing on the moral and theological benefits of free trade universalism. Northeastern liberals largely ignored the economic benefits of free markets. And the mid-century secular turn in economics, especially in British thought, completed the breach between American and European expressions of intellectual capitalism.