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Mary Wollstonecraft's Political Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2019

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Abstract

This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of “machiavelian” power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , Winter 2020 , pp. 25 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to Alan Coffee and Kim Hutchings for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to participants in the Wollstonecraft workshop, APSA September 2017, who inspired this work, and to the editor and anonymous reviewers for detailed and helpful criticisms and suggestions.

References

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18 Taylor, Wollstonecraft and Feminist Imagination, 10–11.

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22 Taylor, Wollstonecraft and Feminist Imagination, 4.

23 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mitchell, L. G. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 90Google Scholar.

24 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 34.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 8, 11–12.

27 Ibid., 9–10.

28 Ibid., 26–27.

29 Ibid., 16.

30 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 253, 263, 275; Residence in Sweden,103.

31 Taylor, “Religious Foundations,” 108; Tom Furniss, “Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution,” in Johnson, ed., Cambridge Companion to Wollstonecraft, 59–60; O'Brien, Karen, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 185–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Burke's attack on Richard Price was one such; see n. 38 below. See also Bradley, James E., Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Rights of Woman, 67, 254–55. Lena Halldenius, “Representation in Mary Wollstonecraft's Political Philosophy,” in Berges and Coffee, eds., Social and Political Philosophy of Wollstonecraft, 161, offers an interpretation of the civil-political distinction different from this. According to her reading, civil rights refer to sovereignty, whereas political rights are against oppression. I agree with Halldenius that political and civil rights are distinct as regards their functions and their place in Wollstonecraft's overall political theory. I also agree that both are theoretically linked to “natural” rights which flow from the equal status of human beings before God, and which proscribe, according to Wollstonecraft, the unnatural hierarchies of rank. Theoretically also, civil and political rights, and their lack, have implications for each other; and the doctrine of popular sovereignty is itself prescriptive of what civil and political rights citizens should have. But I have not found textual supports for her interpretation of the political/civil distinction.

34 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “politic.” For the derogatory meaning of “policy,” see Bawcutt, N. W., “‘Policy,’ Machiavellianism, and the Earlier Tudor Drama,” English Literary Renaissance 1, no. 3 (1971): 195–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), II 1, secs. 1 and 3Google Scholar.

36 He also distinguishes between “the politics of the Electorate and the politics of the Nation” (Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, in Thomas Paine: Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Philp, Mark [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 178Google Scholar).

37 Burke, Reflections, 220.

38 Ibid., 14, 53–54; emphasis in original. Burke is attacking Richard Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1789), http://www.constitution.org/price/price_8.htm—a sermon delivered before a meeting of the London Revolution Society. The Society explicitly connected 1689 and the English bill of rights with 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Burke attacks Price's sermon as a mix of intriguing philosophy and political theology, and as promulgating either nonsense or “a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position” (Reflections, 10–14).

39 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 354Google Scholar.

40 Christie, Ian R., Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1970), 28–31Google Scholar; on the derogatory usage of “minister,” see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 406–8, 412.

41 Runciman, David, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

42 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, x, 12, 29, 131.

43 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Man, 27. Similarly, she counters his lament for the loss of chivalry, in revolutionary times, by charging him with bad, albeit traditional, manners; and her repeated condemnation of cabals, in French Revolution (e.g., 41, 131, 250) mimics and mirrors back Burke's characterization of “the philosophes” as a cabal: Reflections, 11. See O'Neill, Daniel I., The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 16Google Scholar; O'Neill, , “Shifting the Scottish Paradigm: The Discourse of Morals and Manners in Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 1 (2002): 105–6Google Scholar; Bromwich, David, “Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 617–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 415.

45 Ibid., 63, 93.

46 Ibid., 429.

47 Ibid., 53.

48 Ibid., 364–65.

49 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 224.

50 For instance, Rights of Men, 27, 51; French Revolution, 120, 219.

51 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 55–56.

52 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 19.

53 See n. 40 above.

54 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 32; Halldenius, Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism, 102.

55 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 492.

56 Ibid., 131.

57 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 283.

58 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 40; French Revolution, 7; Halldenius, “Representation,” 175.

59 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 57.

60 Ibid., 7; also 511 on how “cast-like society” destroys the character of superiors and debases the inferior to machines.

61 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 59–60; Rights of Woman, 104.

62 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 256, 261, 521.

63 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Man, 29.

64 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 93, 194.

65 Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue, 215–16.

66 Coffee, “Wollstonecraft, Freedom, and Social Domination”; “Freedom as Independence”; Halldenius, Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism.

67 O'Neill, Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate; Bromwich, “Wollstonecraft as Critic of Burke”; Bahar, Eve to Please Me.

68 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 28; also 8, 16, 41.

69 Ibid., e.g. 42, 58.

70 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, Dedication, 66.

71 Ibid., 76.

72 Ibid., 282.

73 Ibid., 250.

74 Wollstonecraft, Mary, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, ed. Luria, Gina (New York: Garland, 1974), 16Google Scholar.

75 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 14, 129, 131, 137; Residence in Sweden, 114, 186–87; McCrystal, John, “Revolting Women: The Use of Revolutionary Discourse in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 2 (1993): 195Google Scholar.

76 Macaulay, Catharine, “Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government,” in Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to Be Found in Mr Hobbes's Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society; with a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government, in a Letter to Signor Paoli (London, 1767), 30–32Google Scholar; On Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, ed. Wordsworth, Jonathan (Washington, DC: Woodstock Books, 1997), 48, 50, 80–81Google Scholar; Madison, James, Hamilton, Alexander, and Jay, John, The Federalist Papers, ed. Kramnick, Isaac (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 366–74Google Scholar; Paine, Rights of Man, 252–54.

77 Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue, xxv; Abbey, “Are Women Human?,” 229–30.

78 Abbey “Are Women Human?”; Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights.

79 Taylor, Natalie Fisher, The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; cf. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 106.

80 Susan James, “Mary Wollstonecraft's Conception of Rights,” in Berges and Coffee, eds., Social and Political Philosophy of Wollstonecraft; Halldenius, Lena, “The Primacy of Right: On the Triad of Liberty, Equality, and Virtue in Wollstonecraft's Political Thought,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2007): 75–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism, 34–39; Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights, 81–83; McCrystal, “Revolting Women,” 202–3.

81 Halldenius, “Primacy of Right,” 93.

82 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 97.

83 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 7; Halldenius, Lena, “Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle,” Hypatia 29, no. 4 (2014): 946–47Google Scholar.

84 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, 7.

85 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 227.

86 Brace, Laura, “Not Empire, but Equality: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marriage State, and the Sexual Contract,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 4 (2000): 434–36Google Scholar. In Coffee's interpretation (“Freedom as Independence,” 917), we must be under social obligations to allow natural duties to be discharged.

87 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 228.

88 Ibid., 222.

89 Ibid., 228. An anonymous reader of an earlier version of this paper interpreted my analysis here as implying that Wollstonecraft is a kind of Rawlsian avant la lettre. On the contrary, Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the effort that has to be put into the “having” and the keeping of the rights and privileges of rank and inequality puts her into a different camp from the twentieth-century liberal thinkers who emphasized distribution of rights, wealth, and so on but tended not to dwell on the efforts—including individual actions and the maintenance of structures—that go into the keeping of them. Wollstonecraft offers a social and political theory of this effort, and her analysis is the more illuminating of the necessary conditions the equalization that is demanded by the natural equality of right and duty.

90 Halldenius, “Primacy of Right,” 93–96; Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 7.

91 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 228. Critics read Wollstonecraft's unfinished The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (in Mary Wollstonecraft: Mary, and the Wrongs of Woman, ed. Kelly, Gary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976], 71–204Google Scholar) as the text in which she begins to work out her political theory of rights and law. See Bahar, An Eve to Please Me, 172–73; Halldenius, “Wollstonecraft's Feminist Critique of Property,” 946–47.

92 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Man, 36.

93 Bahar, An Eve to Please Me, 143–45.

94 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 228.

95 Catherine Packham, “Genre and the Mediation of Political Economy” (unpublished manuscript), 16; Bahar, An Eve to Please Me, 23, 161.

96 Packham, “Domesticity, Objects and Idleness,” 554; “Wollstonecraft's Cottage Economics,” 453–54, 464.

97 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 499; Packham, “Common Grievance,” 705–6.

98 October 5, 1789: Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 420 (this is within the chapter heading of bk. 5, chap. 2),436. See Packham, “Common Grievance,” 708–9.

99 Wollstonecraft, Residence in Sweden, 103–5, 106–7, 115–16.

100 Coffee, “Freedom as Independence,” 909.

101 Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman; Coffee, “Wollstonecraft, Freedom and Social Domination,” 125–26; cf. also Bahar, An Eve to Please Me, 172.

102 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 42.

103 Ibid., 32.

104 Ibid., 414.

105 Ibid., 65–66, 247, 464.

106 Ibid., 215.

107 Ibid., 292–93.

108 Ibid., 272, 472.

109 Wollstonecraft, Residence in Sweden, 116; also Rights of Woman, 264; French Revolution, 521.

110 Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 472ff.

111 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 228–29.