This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

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.

Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft’s major writings – including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, and her travel writing – this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

When Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was first published, it was categorised in Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review as a work of political economy. The introduction asks what this term meant for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and argues that it was used to understand the nature and operation of modern commercial society, as well as the potential for its reformation. Wollstonecraft’s relation to this project is explored, both through a survey of her engagement with Adam Smith and through her lived experience as an unmarried, often indebted woman in a society organised around possession of property. Wollstonecraft is presented as a writer engaging throughout her career as a critic of the connected material, economic, moral, psychological, and social conditions of modern commercial contemporaneity, and as anticipating the opposition to political economy of later Romantic writers.

Chapter 2 considers how Cicero responded to the model of the body politic proposed by Catiline. Rejecting the head of state metaphor, his oratory describes a civic healer capable of diagnosing and curing the ills of the Republic. This idea drew upon a well-established moralizing tradition that identified vice as a contagion that had infected the res publica. Whereas Varro, Sallust, and Lucretius employed such imagery to indict Rome’s governing class for its ambitio and avaritia, Cicero used it to justify the extralegal execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. Although he sought to protect a constitution under threat, his medically inspired language helped legitimize violence as a tool of political engagement. Identifying Clodius and his allies as new malignancies in need of amputation, he contributed to a corrosive cycle of civic conflict that culminated in Pompey’s sole consulship and Caesar’s dictatorship, two constitutional innovations justified as curative remedies. In the end, his rhetoric proved susceptible to appropriation by those less invested in collegial governance than he.

The Conclusion uses the downfall of Nero to consider the legacy of the body politic metaphor in Roman political thought. Julio-Claudian writers relied on the duality of head and body to express fears about the recurrence of civil war. Without a head to command Rome’s warring limbs, they argued, Rome would return to its ancestral cycle of self-destruction. The Year of the Four Emperors confirmed the prescience of their warnings. Plutarch and Tacitus relied on symbolism of a headless body politic to describe the conflict, confirming their perception of sole rule as necessary if not ideal. This contest for power therefore did not weaken the Principate so much as confirm its viability as an institution independent of its Augustan origins. With the rise of the Flavians came the formalization of both sole rule and the Imperial model of the body politic for centuries to come.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

Chapter 5 locates the Younger Seneca and Lucan in a shared conversation about the long-term ramifications of sole rule. It opens with a reading of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is the first text to theorize the metaphors of the healer and head of state. Using both to construct a persuasive ideal of imperial interdependence, Seneca described a body politic whose health vacillates in proportion to the virtue of its princeps. The sick heads and overzealous surgeons that crop up in his other works, however, confirm the risks of such an arrangement. Lucan took this idea as his point of departure in the Bellum Civile, which responds to the imagistic framework of De Clementia through the characters of Sulla and Pompey. Portraying the former as a surgeon who makes excessive use of the scalpel and the latter as a head who suffers the mutiny of his limbs, he portrayed a body politic that was harmed but yet unable to survive without its rulers. He thereby conveyed the futility of politics in a society doomed to civil war.