David Stauffer

The letters published here belong to the ‘Fonds Pierre Prevost’ held by the Library of Geneva. Our presentation of the letters is modelled on that of the published correspondences of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Our aim in transcribing the letters that follow has been to establish a clean and reliable text with minimal editorial intervention. We have made no attempt to normalise the spellings, capitalisation, and apparently aberrant usage found in the letters or to modernise the punctuation, and we have not expanded the contractions that occur in the original texts. However, Prevost’s contractions in Letters 13 and 15 are likely to provide major problems for most readers, and we have therefore added an appendix in which these contractions have been written out.

Summary The correspondence in this issue of History of European Ideas has not previously been published. It is the surviving part of the epistolary exchange between Dugald Stewart and the Genevan professor and man of letters Pierre Prevost (1751?1839) from the 1790s to the 1820s. To this are added several closely connected letters to and from their associates. This correspondence is striking evidence of the republic of letters continuing to flourish in the aftermath of the French Revolution, illustrating the transmission of works, the role of go-betweens, the provision of letters of introduction and the formation of intellectual and personal alliances. Not least, the letters tell us much about the ideas of those involved, and about the formation, development, and relation of these ideas to published works. This is particularly significant for Stewart, most of whose letters and papers are lost