Burke and Wollstonecraft

Writing last week about the Republican National Convention in his New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks described what he felt to be missing from the vision of contemporary American conservatives through a reference to Edmund Burke:

But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Of course, seeing individuals as "embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions" need not in itself lead to any particular political conclusions, conservative or otherwise; indeed, we'll see other thinkers on our syllabus discover in the historically and culturally situated character of social practices grounds of hope for radical change.

To see what's at stake for Burke in his insistence that human beings have to be understood in their cultural and historical context, read carefully his discussion of what distinguishes the "rights of man" from "the real rights of man" (149) on 147-154. Burke's phrase for the historically and culturally situated individual is "the civil social man" (150). What other kind of person is there? What position is he arguing against here, and why?

We'll see Wollstonecraft write smartly and sometimes scathingly about the relation of Burke's aesthetics (from the Enquiry) and his politics (in the Reflections). Let's try to anticipate her somewhat this Wednesday by thinking about these questions in advance. Pay particular attention to examples in the Enquiry with political implications, and to aesthetic language, including language about gender, in the Reflections.

The figure on the right of this 1806 image by William Blake
is Milton's Death, the "shape that shape had none" used by Burke as an
example of the sublime (see p. 103). Like Wollstonecraft, Blake
supported the Revolution, and was suspicious of Burke's aesthetics.

In our glance at the Symposium last week, we noted how Pausanias's speech developed by mapping a set of binary terms onto one another: "heavenly" love is intellectual and takes men for its object, while "common" love is bodily and focuses on women. I'd encourage you to keep track of Burke's developing thought in the Enquiry in a similar way: which other terms get hitched to the sublime, and which to the beautiful? Having a clear sense of which terms are supposed to neatly contrast with each other will attune you to cases where these contrasts become unstable: what examples in the two works trouble these oppositions?

Gender comes into the foreground when Burke describes the capture of the king and queen at Versailles and then proceeds to lament that "the age of chivalry is gone" (170). Burke wasn't alone in seizing on the importance of gender in the events of October 5-6; the crowd that marched on Versailles, initially with the goal of forcing the king to release stockpiled grain so as to ward off famine, was led by Parisian women. Yet Burke harnesses this fact to his own ideological ends: how does this happen in his text?

An image of the Parisian women marching to Versailles on Oct. 5, 1789

Wollstonecraft, no less than Burke, will think about the importance of "customs, traditions, habits and government institutions" for the formation of character, though she'll draw quite different conclusions from what she observes. Whereas Burke laments a change in manners, Wollstonecraft hopes for one; like Burke, she believes in the wide-ranging consequences of such a change: "It is time to effect a revolution in female maners--time to restore to them their lost dignity, and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world" (49). How does Wollstonecraft understand the effects of historical practices and traditions on the formation of women's characters? Why does she differ from Burke as to the necessity of appealing to something outside of history (e.g. to reason or to the characteristics of God)?

Wollstonecraft's arguments about gender are accompanied by, and involved in, an argument about social class: she tells us quite plainly in her introduction that she will "pay particular attention to those [women] in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state" (11). An editor's footnote to this sentence tells us that Wollstonecraft understands the "artificiality of leisure-class [i.e. aristocratic] life" to be unnatural and corrupt; this is right, but there's more to see and say about Wollstonecraft's critique of the aristocracy. What grounds does she give for this critique when she elaborates it later in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman? To what other sorts of people does she compare aristocrats? (See her remarks at the end of chapter III, among other places).

We discussed briefly on Wednesday how a particular notion of sexual love, one that sees it necessarily as distinct from admiration and respect, underlies Burke's aesthetics in the Enquiry. How does Wollstonecraft describe and value sexual love in her Vindications? More generally, what prospects does her argument hold out for women's pleasure and, more broadly, their happiness?

Just as we examined how Burke's texts are structured by opposed terms (the sublime vs. the beautiful, etc.) that sometimes refuse to sit still in their places, we should think critically about the binaries that sometimes structure Wollstonecraft's arguments about gender, class, and sexuality. Keep track, obviously, of how she uses "masculine" and "feminine," but take note too of other important oppositions in her argument.

One of these is a sometimes stark opposition between mind and body. Another is an opposition between reason and emotion, for which "sensibility" is a key term. Wollstonecraft will mock Burke at times for his overheated imagination and emotion, yet she does so in writing about issues that she herself is quite passionate about. Look out for tensions between Wollstonecraft's discussion of emotion on the one hand and, on the other, the expression or performance of emotion in her texts; she was an astute reader of Burke's rhetoric and style, and we'll need to be no less astute in listening to the voice of her two Vindications.

In your comments, feel free to take up any of the questions I've raised along the way in what's above, or to raise new questions that I haven't (there are lots!); the only requirement for this week is that I'd like your comment to refer to (and briefly quote) at least one particular passage, which can be from any of the readings by Burke or Wollstonecraft.