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.

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.