How is it that a controversy about politics becomes a conversation about philosophy? From Hobbes to Harrington to Shaftesbury to Berkeley, Timothy Dykstal explores the public function of the philosophical dialogue at the beginning of England's long eighteenth century. From his close analysis of the works of the era's great philosophers, Dykstal argues that the dialogue as a literary form helped to develop, and subsequently transform, the public sphere in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.

At the beginning of the period, the dialogue gained popularity by...