This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of eighteenth-century manners. In Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness, Jenny Davidson Jenny Davidson demonstrates how the arguments that define hypocrisy as a moral and political virtue thrived in eighteenth-century Britain's culture of politeness. In doing so, she sheds light on the writing of a wide range of authors, including Locke, Swift, Hume, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. They believed that the public practice of vice was far more dangerous for society than discrepancies between what people say and do in private. In the debate about the balance between truthfulness and politeness, Davidson argues that eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Austen come down firmly on the side of politeness. This is the case even when it is associated with dissimulation or hypocrisy. These writers argue that the open profession of vice is far more dangerous for society than even the most glaring discrepancies between what people say in public and what they do in private. This book explores what happens when controversial arguments in favour of hypocrisy enter the mainstream, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between hypocrisy and more obviously attractive qualities like modesty, self-control and tact.  It is written in an accessible and lively style

'… is a model of its type - a timely, tightly argued and restlessly provocative monograph.' Times Literary Supplement

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