The Civic We of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

Abstract: Benjamin Franklin’s famous Autobiography is most often understood as a tale of one inspiring individual’s self-improvement. But equally, it exhorts others to improve society more broadly. The idea, let alone faith, that we can improve the world has been taking a beating. But this essay appears in the journal of a learned society Franklin helped to establish not quite three hundred years ago, in 1743. The American Philosophical Society still exists to identify and encourage a collective of experts to do good in the world—a civic “we” that Franklin bequeathed to us.