Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft

• How do these excerpts compare? Do we get enough of Burke's text to appreciate all the references made by Wollstonecraft?

• Catholic Emancipation
• Richard Price
• common law vs. statute law: The difference between the common law and statute is that whereas statute is codified, common law is not.

• What appears to be Burke's central argument?

• Explain:  "Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies" (103).
• cf. Rousseau's Emile:
• Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down, he disfigures everything, he loves deformities, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man himself. For him man must be trained like a saddle- horse; he must be shaped according to the fashion, like trees in his garden.

• Why must the constituent parts of the state all work together?
• What is the body politic?

• What is an entailed inheritance?
• Explain:  "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors" (105).
• What is "a permanent body composed of transitory parts" (105)?
• Explain: "In this choice of inheritance, we [are] . . . binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections" (105).

• Because of this inheritance, "the spirit of freedom . . . is tempered with an awful gravity" (106).
• Explain:  "We procure reverence to ur civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to  revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended" (106).
• What is the difference between levelling and equalizing, according to Burke?  What is the "natural order of things" (106)?
• Explain: "Law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule" (106).
• Explain: "All men have equal rights; but not to equal things" (106). [Would Wollstonecraft agree?]

• Is this a sympathetic portrayal of Louis XVI? Of their captors?  Explain.

• Explain: "The age of chivalry is gone" (108). [Is this necessarily a bad thing?]

• Explain:  "All homage paid to the [female] sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly" (109). [Why is such a statement included in a discussion of the Revolution?]
• Explain:  "Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition" (109).
• Explain:  "Public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law" (109).

• Explain: "All the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: . . . the nobility and the clergy" (110).
• Explain:  "Our minds . . . are purified by terror and pity" (110).

• Explain the relevance of the analogies to drama that Burke employs here.
• Explain:  "He should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious | awe and trembling solicitude" (111).

• Explain:  "Society is a contract" ==> "It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born" (112).
• What is "the great primaeval contract of eternal society" (112)?

• What is "sensibility" (113)? How does Wolstonecraft characterize Burke's embodiment of it?
• school of philosophy that saw human society as deriving from and sustained by bonds of feeling and sympathy.
• For Burke, the family values of loyalty and heredity "act like instincts, having no need of reason. W's version owes much to the egalitarian, experimental, but no less emotional  relationships of progressive groups.  Though it is from the heart that all that is great and good comes, it must be an educated heart.  W rejected the automatism of B's view of the passions"(Jones 45).
• "The passions may be involuntary, but they can be subjected to analysis" (Jones 46).
• How does her definition of the rights of men compare with Burke's on pge. 106?

• Explain:  "The demon of property has ever been at hand to encroach on the sacred rights of men" (113-14).

• Explain:  "The whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation" (115).

• What is primogeniture?  How, according to Wollstonecraft, does it lead to parental tyranny?
• How, according to Wollstonecraft, does it impact individual morality?

• Why does Wollstonecraft agree with Burke's views on the "homage paid to the [female] sex" (117)?
• Explain her discussion of the missing "father" in the quote from Burke.
• Explain:  "When the heart speaks we are seldom shocked by hyperbole" (117).

• Explain:  "Improveable reason has not yet discovered the perfection it may arrive at--God forbid!" (118).

• Explain this quote from Burke:  "'They must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice'" (119).

• What is the "fostering sun of kindness" (120)?
• 120n:
• What are "enclosure acts"? How do they contribute to the problems Wollstonecraft is discussing?
• Explain:  "Virtue can only flourish among equals" (120).
• Explain:  "Is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world, to receive the blessings this could afford?" (120).
• Who/What is "the idol human weakness had set up?  Explain.
• Explain her final statement.

• Connection to American Revolutionary Rhetoric (see Declaration of Independence )

• How, according to the editors, does Paine's style compare to Burke's?
• Explain:  "The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies" (122).  To what aspect of Burke's argument is Paine alluding?

• How is Burke "contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living" (123)?
• Explain:  "A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent" (123).
• In what ways, according to the editors, was Louis XVI "the friend of the Nation"(123--see 123)?

• Explain:  "A casual discontinuance of the practice of despotism, is not a discontinuance of its principles" (124).
• How, according to Paine, is it true that despotism "divides and subdivides itself" (124).

• Explain:  "It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates" (125).
• Are Paine's suggestions about "so few sacrifices" accurate? Is it true that "principles, and not persons, were tbe meditated objects of destruction" (125)?  Explain.

• Explain:  "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird" (126).
• Explain:  "If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed forever, it was the first generation that existed" (126).  Is there a contradiction involved here?  Explain.
• What does Paine mean by the "unity of man" (126)?

• According to Paine,  what two points comprise man's duty?
• What, according to Paine, is government?
• Explain:  "A nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and to establish such as accords with its interest, disposition and happiness" (127).

• According to Paine, how do the revolutions in America and France differ from past revolutions?