ABSTRACT
Whilst she is remembered for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men is Mary Wollstonecraft’s most important political work as it lays out the basis of her understanding of the nature and character of the current relationships between human beings and what would be required for their transformation from distorted to authentic bonds. It is a complex and multi-faceted text that seeks to counter Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France using a number of ad hominem as well as substantive arguments. In so doing, it reaches back to Burke’s early publication, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and this will shape not only the content of the first Vindication, but Wollstonecraft’s language and positions on manliness, femininity, the sublime, the beautiful, manners, the progress of civilization, respect and love, and cognate subjects. The chapter seeks to give some sense of the text’s richness and importance.
