Radical and deist writing

The fundamental epistemological distinction between enthusiastic and rational radicalism, which issues in important distinctions of expression and style, as well as thought, in radical prose, tends to become blurred in attempts to map a continuous tradition of free-thinking and libertinism in Britain and Ireland, stretching from the English Revolution to the eighteenth century. Whereas the self-proclaimed prophets proclaimed the irrelevance of humanist intellectual tradition to the experience of the internal Spirit or 'inner light', the deists and free-thinkers made their bookishness and access to the classical tradition a key element of their appeal to a superior rationality. Where there is some ideological overlap between the traditions is in a shared and vigorous anticlericalism; but there is also, as this chapter shows, a stylistic continuity in the use of irony, satire, and parody by university-educated radicals of the mid-century.