Book contents
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 2 - The Engagement with Burke
Contesting the ‘Natural Course of Things’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men as staging not merely a political argument with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but a political economic one. By exhuming the obscured economic substrata of Burke’s work, Wollstonecraft exposes the injustices of the socio-economic order which he sought to naturalise and attacks the economic order on which late eighteenth-century society was founded. Wollstonecraft shows how Burke weaponises ‘specious’ human feeling in defence of existing structures, and how he defends a political economy which subjugates human feeling to a defence of the status quo. In contrast, Wollstonecraft resists the separation of political economic concerns from questions of liberty, equality, and happiness. By insisting that sympathetic feeling for others should be used to reform human community and to motivate political actions to sustain human happiness, she asserts human feeling as an alternative ground of value.
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- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political EconomyThe Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity, pp. 50 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024