author
Richard Price
1723–1791
A bold 18th-century thinker, this Welsh minister wrote about morality, liberty, finance, and public life with unusual range. His ideas reached far beyond the pulpit and made him an important voice in the age of the American and French Revolutions.
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About the author
Born in Wales in 1723, Richard Price became a Nonconformist minister, moral philosopher, and mathematician whose work crossed the boundaries between religion, politics, and practical public affairs. He studied at a dissenting academy in London and later built a reputation as a serious intellectual as well as a preacher.
Price is especially remembered for writing on ethics, civil liberty, and finance. He published influential work on life insurance, annuities, and public debt, and he also argued strongly for political reform. His support for the American Revolution, and later his warm response to the early French Revolution, made him a widely discussed and sometimes controversial public figure.
He died in 1791, but his legacy reaches into several fields at once: philosophy, political thought, economics, and early actuarial science. That unusual mix helps explain why he still stands out as one of the most versatile minds of the 18th century.