Dublin

The Irish capital on the Liffey, second city of the eighteenth-century British world and a lively node of its intellectual life around Trinity College. George Berkeley entered Trinity at fifteen and conceived there the immaterialism that bears his name; Edmund Burke followed a generation later, founding a debating club before he went on to found modern conservatism.

Dublin in the eighteenth century was the second city of the British empire, laying out Georgian squares while the countryside stayed poor. Trinity College sat at the center and educated most of its thinkers. Berkeley was a student and then a fellow there, and had worked out his argument that matter is nothing apart from perception before he turned thirty. Burke studied at Trinity too and left for London and politics. Swift was dean of St Patrick's, writing satire that made the poverty impossible to look away from.