John Adams versus Mary Wollstonecraft on the French Revolution and Democracy

2007 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel I. O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
John Adams ◽  
The French Revolution

The Labours of History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Sophia Lee ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity, 1789–91

2020 ◽  
pp. 175508822097843
Author(s):  
Eileen Hunt Botting
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Legal Entitlement ◽  
The French Revolution

Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely following the international politics of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft developed the core arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her key philosophical innovation was to publicly universalize the conceptual scope of rights, such that rights were no longer—implicitly or explicitly—solely the legal entitlement of propertied white European men, but rather the moral and political entitlement of the whole of humanity across nations. Yet she rhetorically contradicted and philosophically limited the cross-cultural universalism of her theory of equal rights by punctuating her arguments with Western Protestant and Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern despotism. Consequently, international politics and international prejudice shaped Wollstonecraft’s theory of equal rights and her application of it to peoples and cultures beyond those of Western Protestant Europe.

An Early Suitor of Mary Wollstonecraft

PMLA ◽  
1943 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-169
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Nitchie
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The French Revolution

Amongst the numerous fair ones to whom the singular Rector of Stukeley paid his addresses, was the once famous Mary Wolstonecraft [sic], distinguished during the period of the French Revolution for her democratical writings, and afterwards united to Mr. Godwin, author of St. Leon, &c. Several letters from this intellectual Amazon exist among the papers of the Rev. Gentleman.These words interrupted a search of the newspaper files for an item about Mary Shelley. Although that search proved futile, the bit of unexpected news about her famous mother was adequate reward for the effort. For the Reverend Joshua Waterhouse, the singular Rector of Stukeley—or more accurately Little Stukeley—was an entirely new character in the drama of Mary Wollstonecraft's life, unmentioned by and apparently unknown to any of her biographers. His identity and his history were soon made clear by other issues of the London newspapers, by the Huntingdon Gazette, and by two little books occasioned by his sudden and sordid death. And knowledge of his existence and of his character throws light on certain passages in Mary Wollstonecraft's writings.

A Perennial Problem

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Mayville
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
John Adams ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter considers John Adams' Defence of the Constitutions within a transatlantic debate about the desirability of English-style balanced government—a constitutional model that attempted to counterpose the monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic social elements together within the same government. The debate was most pronounced in Paris in the years preceding the French Revolution, when Anglomanes who sympathized with balanced government defended the model from the attacks of French reformers. It argues that Adams, though a defender of a certain idea of balanced government, departed from the prevalent theory. Whereas conventional Anglomanes had emphasized the danger to such balance posed by the popular, democratic element, Adams was preoccupied instead with the threat to that balance posed by an overweening aristocratic class.

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