The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789: Is Love of One’s Country Good for Humanity?

Though they appear divergent at first glance, the reactions of Richard Price and Edmund Burke to the French Revolution may not be so different. Ultimately the difference between Burke on one side, and Price and Mary Wollstonecraft on the other, may be traced to the widely different degrees of suspicion with which they approached the idea of equality. Social equality, Burke thought, and the discovery of political rights to support equality were a catastrophic error that could lead to nothing but violence. For Price and Wollstonecraft, democratic equality was a natural effect of our coming to know that inequality, and institutions such as primogeniture that sanctified inequality, were a human invention that produced more misery than happiness. None of these writers was without ambivalence about democracy, but Price and Wollstonecraft were contingent allies of democratic reform and showed it in their own time; while Burke was a resolute opponent of democracy, and did his best to slow down the progress under way in Britain toward a reform of representation in parliament.