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Around the year 1757, a Turkish man, born in Constantinople, educated in Paris, and a former servant of the French East India Company in south India, boarded an English ship in Bombay. This Turk, variously known as Mustafa or Monsieur Raymond, quickly made friends with the English captain of the ship, a Mr Ranier. Mustafa described Ranier as possessing a ‘general benevolence for mankind’, and an ‘uprightness’, virtues that soon seemed to him to be ‘characteristical in the English’. Captain Ranier and Mustafa became friends, partly because, in Mustafa's own words, ‘I had learned his tongue with a rapidity that amazed us both’; with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar, I learned enough of English in the nineteen days from Bombay to Balassor, as to delight in Bolingbroke's philosophical works. The English itself is no ways Difficult, and to a man already master of some Latin and French it is a very easy acquisition. The story of a French-educated Turk, on an English ship in the Indian ocean, reading one of the pre-eminent political philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain is a vivid illustration of the dizzying transpositions involved in the expansion of British power in Asia. Mustafa stayed in Bengal, and made a fitful career out of service to high-ranking officers of the English East India Company as they laid the foundations of the British empire in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jürgen Habermas' influential model of the rise of public opinion as a force in the state argues that ‘[a] public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century’ when, with the end of censorship, ‘a press devoted to the debate of political issues developed out of the pamphlet’. The principle of universal access is central to Habermas' thesis about the emergence (as opposed to the structural transformation) of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete’, he explains, ‘it was not a public sphere at all.’ As it consists of ‘private persons come together as a public’, the public sphere, in its appeal to reason as a governing principle, is in a crucial sense disinterested. The period from the later seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries has been described, quite rightly, as ‘the first age of party’. This inevitably presents problems for a thesis in which ‘rational-critical’ debate is posited as being somehow free from party-political (or any other) considerations. On the contrary, it is clear that politicians immediately appreciated the possibilities presented by the existence of a free press for influencing parliamentary as well as public opinion. While Edmund Burke was drafting Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he received a letter from the Marquis of Rockingham: “I wish it may be read by all the members of Parliament – and by all the politicians in town and country prior to the meeting of Parliament. I think it would take universally, and tend to form and to unite a party upon real and well founded principles – which would in the end prevail and re-establish order and Government in this country.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE OPENING SHOTS On 29 April 1595 William Barrett, a fellow of Caius College, preached a sermon to the university from the pulpit of Great St Mary's. His sermon concerned the nature and extent of Christian assurance. He denied, in short, that such assurance was either possible or desirable for the ordinary believer. No one, in this uncertain world, he argued, could aspire to believe in the certainty of his own salvation, at least not with the certainty of faith, unless he had been vouchsafed a personal revelation from God concerning his own spiritual state. As for Christ's prayer that man's faith should not fail, which was often cited in support of the extreme view of assurance, Barrett restricted its application to the Apostle Peter alone. He concluded that to be thus certain and secure concerning one's own perseverance (something by its very nature dependant on contingent circumstances and events) was to be guilty of very great pride and impiety. While the remission of sins was to be accepted as an article of faith, that did not extend to its application to individuals. Men neither could nor should believe with complete faith or certainty that their own sins were forgiven and remitted. For Barrett faith was unitary. There was no distinction to be drawn between different types of faith, merely between different types of believer. Applying such ideas to the doctrine of predestination he asserted that ‘sin was the proper and first cause of reprobation’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]