Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen

Jenny Davidson demonstrates how the arguments that define hypocrisy as a moral and political virtue thrived in eighteenth-century Britain's culture of politeness. However, Davidson also concludes that eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Austen believed that the public practice of vice was far more dangerous for society than discrepancies between what people say and do in private.