Preface

Much has been written and said about this wonderful champion of the eighteenth century, but the subject is too vast and still very far from being exhausted.

Emma Goldman, 1911

More than a century on, Goldman's words still strike a chord. A great deal more has now been written about Wollstonecraft, but such is the nature of both her personality and her thought that her study remains fresh and stimulating, with ample scope for further enquiry. Although at different times, and amongst different audiences, attitudes have varied towards her work over the past two centuries, it is hard to think of any other philosopher who has consistently generated such a level of inspiration and devotion amongst students, activists and scholars alike. Wollstonecraft is also unusual in the degree to which she appeals to academics and students across university departments, rather than being primarily the 'property' of any specific faculty. The last fifty years, in particular, have seen a surge of interest in Wollstonecraft's thought. In the 1970s and 1980s, much of the focus on Wollstonecraft came from feminists and literary scholars, with political theorists and intellectual historians picking up the scent in the 1990s. Philosophers, regrettably, came very late to the party, with sustained attention to Wollstonecraft only emerging as a force over the last decade. In that time, fortunately, some excellent philosophical treatments have been produced, such as Sandrine Bergès's Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft's 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (2013), Lena Halldenius's Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (2015) and the contributions of several scholars to The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2016).

With so much having been written, even very recently - the beginning of the 2020s alone has seen the publication of Nancy Johnson and Paul Keen's collection of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, Eileen Hunt Botting's two-volume set of Portraits of Wollstonecraft, and Sylvana Tomaselli's Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, Politics, amongst others - readers could very reasonably ask what is to be gained from having another Wollstonecraft book, or at least what might in some way differentiate my offering sufficiently to warrant an investment of time and money.

My answer is that I present Wollstonecraft's philosophical framework as a systematic whole built up from a small set of underlying axioms, principles and premises. Starting with a conception of a benevolent and rational God, she derives a set of values clustered around the ideals of freedom, equality and virtue that drive her moral and political thinking and which permeate her entire body of work. These values, which are brought together within the concept of freedom as independence, remain remarkably constant throughout her career and across the many genres within which she wrote. While her thought deepened and grew more subtle as she matured, the fundamental principles with which she worked remained very stable, giving an overall coherence to her corpus taken as a whole.

Not everyone agrees with this conclusion, or indeed the approach that underlies it. Barbara Taylor, for example, believes that 'Wollstonecraft's corpus is riddled with inconsistencies and paradoxes', arguing that we should acknowledge and appreciate this, rather than seeking to 'reconcile competing positions whenever possible' (2020). Taylor's position is that Wollstonecraft is 'often best understood through these tensions, which highlight both the novelty and complexity of the issues with which she was struggling, and the creative energy that she brought to them, shifting tack as she learned more, thought harder', concluding that, Wollstonecraft 'was not an academic but a revolutionary: what did mere consistency mean to her?' I accept much of what Taylor says. There is great value in encountering Wollstonecraft through her life, biographically and in her social context. But this is not the only approach that can bear fruit.

We learn different things about Wollstonecraft when we approach her theoretically, making sense of the internal logic that she saw herself as bringing to her work across its many genres and by seeing how groundbreaking her conceptual innovations were, both in her time and when we bring her into dialogue with scholars working on the kinds of problem we face today. We can undoubtedly find inconsistencies, tensions and contradictions in the work of any major historical philosopher - such as John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom Wollstonecraft engaged, or Immanuel Kant, who was her contemporary - but rarely will we conclude that this aspect characterizes their thought. The salient difference between them and Wollstonecraft, I suggest, is not that her work is especially inconsistent (certainly, it is not my view that it is 'riddled' with inconsistencies) but that there have been centuries of academic focus dedicated to the analysis of these other thinkers' work that builds their perceived credentials as bona fide philosophers. Wollstonecraft has not had that benefit - no historical woman philosopher has - though the tide is beginning to turn on this.

In resisting the move to systematize Wollstonecraft, Taylor places two approaches in tension. 'Ought we', she asks, to commemorate Wollstonecraft, 'the bold Enlightenment philosopher, rather than Wollstonecraft the trailblazing feminist?', answering in favour of the latter. It would, I believe, be a mistake to lose sight of either. On the one hand, Wollstonecraft was unflinching in her commitment to the central importance of reason and logical argument and the imperative to rise above one's circumstances and upbringing in an effort to shed one's prejudices. On the other, she lived in a patriarchal society whose culture and institutions had developed over millennia around the core principle that women were not fully rational and should not be permitted to attempt to become so. These two aspects do not sit comfortably together. Wollstonecraft identified the basic contradiction at work, that women were human beings who were expected to live up to certain aspects of human virtue while at the same time having one of the most fundamental elements of their human nature denied to them. Wollstonecraft the philosopher applied rational argument with great insight and skill, while Wollstonecraft the woman and the revolutionary had to live her life and bring her fight in the messy, contradictory real world. To overlook either aspect would be both a loss to Wollstonecraft scholarship and an injustice to Wollstonecraft herself.

In any case, it would likely be impossible for Wollstonecraft the woman and philosopher to please everyone. Where Taylor applauds the writer who lived unconventionally and 'openly defended illicit female sexual pleasure' in her final, unfinished work, Harriet Martineau, speaking of Wollstonecraft some century and a half earlier, finds that she must 'decline all fellowship and co-operation with women of genius or otherwise favourable position, who injure the cause by their personal tendencies' (1877: 302). Nevertheless, that we need not choose between Wollstonecraft as philosopher and as feminist does not mean that every book should attempt to examine both.

There is great value in understanding what the driving principles are in any thinker and in analysing how these are brought together within a unified framework since this can make a considerable difference to how we understand their thought. Beginning in the 1970s, for example, it was common to interpret Wollstonecraft's use of such key terms as 'freedom' and 'independence' in a classically liberal sense that owed more to prevailing assumptions about the ideas of Locke and John Stuart Mill than to a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft herself, and which sat awkwardly with the development of feminism at that time. This led many feminists to label Wollstonecraft as an individualistic writer, one who had unreflectively imbibed masculine and patriarchal concepts from her environment, even as she struggled for women's equality. Where she was acknowledged as reacting against these concepts, Wollstonecraft was often regarded as either being confused in her liberalism or lacking the conceptual resources to develop an alternative.1

That individualistic interpretation is no longer the dominant view. In our own time, we have seen the benefit of different disciplinary approaches working together to advance Wollstonecraft studies. Intellectual historians have shown that Wollstonecraft operated within something closer to the republican tradition on the basis of her social context and the circle in which she moved, while philosophers have demonstrated that this orientation makes better sense of the balance and integration of the ideas that she makes central. Understood from this perspective, freedom is not a stand-alone concept that is in tension with community but a composite term that entails a number of relational values, such as equality, civic virtue, interdependence and the common good. Neither did Wollstonecraft simply or naively and uncritically adopt an alternative but equally masculine and patriarchal set of principles and attitudes. Rather, this concept of freedom furnished Wollstonecraft with a conceptual baseline from which she challenged received...