The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy

5 Vindicating a Revolution in Morals and Manners

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men was the first published reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. She wrote it hastily. Burke’s work appeared on the first of November 1790, and her answer, initially anonymous, was in print by the end of the month. In December a second edition, bearing her name on the title page, appeared.1 In this chapter I argue that we can best understand Wollstonecraft’s direct contribution to the Revolution controversy as a critique of Burke’s moral theory and the historical narrative used to defend it, seen through the lens of her own critical engagement with Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy and historiography. In response to Burke’s deployment of the language of instinctive “common sense” feelings, or “sensibility,” as a means of naturalizing the historical development of political, social, and gender hierarchies, Wollstonecraft argued that these forms of inequality were not only pernicious but socially constructed. Her chief claim was that morals were virtues learned only through the exercise of reason, and that hierarchies of all sorts had created an artificial system of manners over the course of European history that worked to stunt the development of virtue, and thus of civilization. Wollstonecraft asserted that all such hierarchies had to be replaced by new relationships constructed on the basis of democratic equality, and she believed that this was the great potential of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication zeroes in on the core of Burke’s argument , showing that his vision of history depends on a particular understanding of the role played by the nobility and church. By linking historical analysis of these two institutions with a sharp critique of Burkean moral theory, Mary Wollstonecraft emerges as Edmund Burke’s most powerful critic. Moreover, as I show in the second half of this chapter, her critique of Burke also acted as a springboard for the foundational work of modern feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Feminism’s most Vindicating a Revolution in Morals and Manners 5 1. All quotations of Wollstonecraft are from The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1989), hereafter cited as Works of Wollstonecraft. 158 I The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate famous early work can thus be read as part of an extended reply to the founding father of modern conservatism, occasioned by the French Revolution and forged by a radical egalitarian who had appropriated and utterly transformed the Scottish Enlightenment discourses of moral philosophy and historiography.2 False Sensibility and Faulty Historiography: Wollstonecraft’s Reply to Burke Identifying Burke as a Theorist of “Common Sense,” or “Sensibility” In the short “advertisement” affixed to A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft writes that in reading Burke’s Reflections she soon became indignant at “the sophistical arguments, that every moment crossed me, in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common sense.” The importance of this remark for understanding Wollstonecraft’s overall political theory is difficult to overestimate. From the outset, she categorized 2. In Chapter 7 I extend this argument to Wollstonecraft’s lesser-known but tremendously important Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. In interpreting the Vindications, what follows is particularly indebted to Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I have also benefited from Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), and Wendy Gunther-Canada’s, Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). None of these scholars, however, has read the Vindications against the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment language of politics, as I am doing here. For other important, but distinctively different, arguments dealing specifically with Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication, see David Bromwich, “Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 617–34; James Conniff, “Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 2 (1999): 299–318; and Mitzi Myers, “Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft ’s First Vindication,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6 (1977): 113–32. Steven Blakemore, in Intertextual War: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine...