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 3 - Property, Passions, and Manners
Political Economy and the Vindications
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 and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman as integral to her critique of the culture, behaviour, psychology, and ‘manners’ of commercial society. Against a narrative of human motivation deeply rooted in political economic discourse, Wollstonecraft associates property with indolence, libertinism, and immorality, and offers an alternative moral economy which links virtue to effort, labour, and exertion in the linked spheres of mind, manners, and morals. The imagination is revealed as posing a fundamental challenge to political economy, as an independent power which frees the self from the subject relations of property order. In calling for a ‘revolution in manners’ addressed especially to women, Wollstonecraft looks to a moral revolution against the forces of history and calls on women to save commercial society from itself, and to save themselves from it.
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- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political EconomyThe Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity, pp. 76 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024