Description
Book SynopsisMany modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). O'Neill says at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery (Burke) or toward civilization (Wollstonecraft).
Trade Review“Who would have thought there was much new and fascinating to say about Burke and Wollstonecraft? But O’Neill’s argument, rooted in their response to the French Revolution and their relationship to Scottish Enlightenment ideas, is wonderfully fresh and illuminating, shedding new light on many a shadowy part of Burke’s conservatism and Wollstonecraft’s feminism.”
—Isaac Kramnick,Cornell University
“This is an excellent contribution to the literatures on Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke and to the growing discussions of the significance of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
—Virginia Sapiro,University of Wisconsin, Madison
“It is fascinating to learn of Mary Wollstonecraft’s perception that Scottish stadial theory would end in the reign of sensibility, and the reign of sensibility in the ‘Angel in the House.’ From the Sublime and the Beautiful to Sense and Sensibility, via the Theory of Moral Sentiments! Daniel O’Neill has opened a new path.”
—J. G. A. Pocock,The Johns Hopkins University
“This book should be read. O’Neill has given great and creditable effort to bringing these figures into fresh focus. If the overall effect is not so persuasive as he may wish, the questions about Burke and Wollstonecraft raised by this study, and its suggestion of a boundary beyond which the Scot’s influence does not extend, remain valuable.”
—Steven P. Millies Journal of British Studies
“O’Neill’s book is a fascinating addition to a growing literature on the origins of modern conservatism and the emergence of modern feminism.”
—Wendy Gunther-Canada American Historical Review
“This excellent book is a wonderful success, one that deserves a broad audience among historians of eighteenth-century political thought and contemporary political theorists alike.”
—Ryan Patrick Hanley History of Political Thought
“This excellent book is a wonderful success . . . it is a model of scholarship. . . . Particularly noteworthy are O'Neill’s sensitivity to the normative elements of Scottish views on the civilizing process, his emphasis on the centrality of moral psychology in Burke’s mature political theory, his recovery of Wollstonecraft’s account of associationism, and his critique of ‘the new scholarly orthodoxy on Burke and empire.'”
—Ryan Patrick Hanley History of Political Thought
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Scottish Enlightenment, the Moral Sense, and the Civilizing Process
2. Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment
3. Wollstonecraft and the Scottish Enlightenment
4. “The Most Important of All Revolutions”
5. Vindicating a Revolution in Morals and Manners
6. Burke on Democracy as the Death of Western Civilization
7. Wollstonecraft on Democracy as the Birth of Western Civilization
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
