Benjamin Franklin

The common consensus of the class is that Benjamin Franklin’s pride and confidence make for a completely different author than those read so far. Further, this suggests his sense of self, of the individual within its own set of principles and ideals, is the focal point of Franklin and a huge step from the communal concepts written of by the previous authors. Whereas Cotton Mather wrote a manual for recognizing evil in the hopes of bettering a person in relation to God, Franklin’s autobiography operates as a manual in the betterment of a person for the person. Isolating an individual from its community and giving it sovereignty, the idea of a pure pursuit of perfection for the self is oddly outside Puritan writing which always connects a man to something else: God or community. Benjamin Franklin relies on community for its civility, giving a reference for a person’s progress. This in itself is a kind of communal thought, but as a set of commandments gives way to a set of principles, the emphasis on one’s own place within said community becomes apparent and a complete departure from an author like Mather’s placement of the individual in a group’s goals.