ABSTRACT
This essay considers Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794). Commentators have frequently noted how Wollstonecraft and Burke both employ a language of feeling to articulate their political views. This essay builds on that work, but focuses on Wollstonecraft’s and Burke’s engagement with a particular kind of feeling: their understanding of instinctive behaviour, and its effects on the political actions of individuals and societies. Both Burke and Wollstonecraft were well-informed about contemporary debates relating to instinct in medical and natural history texts, as both wrote or edited review essays for the periodical press which commented on medicine and natural history, Burke for the Annual Register and Wollstonecraft for the Analytical Review. But Burke and Wollstonecraft differ strongly on the significance of instinct. Burke seems comfortable with the idea that humans, like animals, act on instincts that override their rational faculties. Wollstonecraft insists that human reason is distinct from animal instinct, because humans have the capacity to improve and develop their reason. For Wollstonecraft virtuous humanity, developed through the use of reason, is what separates humans from animals. Wollstonecraft’s disparagement of instinct arms her with powerful tools to attack Burke’s arguments in the Reflections, where he celebrates ‘natural feelings’ and ‘inbred sentiments.’ For Wollstonecraft in the Vindication, this shows that Burke neglects his rational faculties, to the extent that he dehumanises himself. Wollstonecraft is disturbed, however, by the capacity of the poor, especially revolutionary collectives in France, to display instinctive, animal-like behaviour. While she largely overcomes this anxiety in the Vindication, in the Historical and Moral View she condemns the inhumanity of the revolutionaries and at times her rhetoric comes close to that of Burke.
