An Age of Patronage

Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, once said that patronage was “the tribute which opulence owes to genius.” If you were wealthy, it was your moral obligation to give back to the community – not merely by improving the lot of the poor or renovating your local church but also by supporting artists and intellectuals.

For France’s eighteenth century gens de lettres, patronage was “the consideration and support owing to those who illuminated their age,” as Edward Andrew writes in his Patrons of Enlightenment, a book that explores the financial backing of the Enlightenment’s most prominent names. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson famously said, and royal or aristocratic patronage was the highest version of that: writers and thinkers were paid (sometimes handsomely) for their sustenance so that they could devote themselves wholeheartedly to their craft.

Patronage was how many of the Enlightenment thinkers made a living. John Locke, the property rights theorist and political philosopher foundational to classical liberalism, owed much of his professional success to the backing of Lord Shaftesbury. Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher and early economist, famously accompanied his patron’s son, the young Duke of Buccleuch Henry Scott, on his Grand Tour of Europe in the 1760s. Both Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton depended on wealthy patrons to support their writing.

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Πηγή: aier.org