The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America

Benjamin Franklin famously counseled that knowledge is valuable in direct proportion to its utility. Unfortunately, Lyons’s (The House of Wisdom) repetitive cultural history of a shopworn subject will be of little use to anyone at all familiar with the topic. Still, like Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, his approach is an engaging one—by exploring ideas through the people who thought them, he adds substance to an otherwise airy discussion. Franklin, along with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, botanist John Bartram, and physician Benjamin Rush, all sought to foster utilitarian knowledge in hopes of enhancing the economic, political, and social character of colonial America. To that end, Franklin launched a kind of proto–think tank in 1727 that “combined the conviviality of a private drinking club with the advantages of a mutual-aid society, the moral and intellectual self-improvement of a discussion circle, and the altruism of a civic association.” Lyons’s obvious and unsurprising conclusion is that these prescient thinkers secured the values of the “mechanic, artisan, engineer, and inventor in American society.” Agent: Will Lippincott, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (June)