Witherspoon, for his part, divided the subject into “Ethics” and “Politics.”61 The former might be taken as being about governing the individual, while the latter is about governing society. Today such a course might be considered something like an overview of political and social science.62 Back then it would have been seen as instruction on how to be a virtuous person and how to cultivate a society of virtuous individuals—with all the import that virtue carried in the eighteenth century.
