International audience When Ambrose Philips issued his biweekly essay periodical, The Free Thinker (1718-1721), times were uncertain. The principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were threatened by party factions, by rumours of a Jacobite landing, by the spread of atheism and the development of the vulgar opinion. The Whig government therefore commissioned Ambrose Philips, a staunch Whig writer to support its policy with this new journalistic venture. A poet and a playwright as well as a great admirer of Addison and Steele for whom he had sent several contributions to the Spectator and the Guardian, Philips clearly wrote in the line of the Spectator, advocating vision and the observation of the eighteenth-century society as the preconditions to writing essays and to moral and social reforms. His project however differs from Steele’s and Addison’s in so far as the Spectator sought to exalt Whig principles through the spread of politeness and conversation and through the universal pleasures of the imagination. For them, Whig politics were grounded in some forms of aesthetics which was to be experienced in everyday life and the language of manners. The Free Thinker also pays great attention to language, but its concern focuses far more on the meaning of words than on the manners they betray. From the first issue onwards, Mr. Freethinker was eager to redefine such terms as Religion, superstition, atheism whose true meanings he believes have been warped by the vulgar opinion. He denounces the tyranny exercised by the opinion through language and associates the improper use of words to flawed and oppressive political systems. Thus he considers his periodical venture as a way to vindicate and reestablish through accurate wordings reason and harmony in the nation. Moreover, contrary to Steele and Addison who defined whiggism in a broad way, the Free Thinker publicized a narrow conception of whiggism. According to the journal, whiggism is a way of thinking which he paradoxically equates with the liberty of thinking. Free thinking, as he defines it, is one’s capacity to use one’s instruction and reason and to judge the world around freely, with an unprejudiced mind. For the Free Thinker, such a philosophical state of mind can only lead the reader to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Whig principles and politics and the perfidiousness of the Tory opposition. Paradoxically, one is only free when one thinks in a Whig way. Hence the necessity for the journalist to comment on current affairs. The Free Thinker deals with a wide range of topical subjects (from the celebrations of royal anniversaries to the scandal of the South sea Bubble, not to mention the plague scare of 1721 or the assassination plot against George I in 1718) so as to instruct his readers about the working of the body politics and so as to teach them how to interpret those events. His aim was to make sure that the readers would be able to read the news through the Whig prism that he had taught them and to turn them into good citizens, namely Whig partisans. Despite its party propaganda, the Free-Thinker was nevertheless a successful publication as its length of publication and as the various editions in volume form testify.