울스턴크래프트와 버크—프랑스대혁명과 계몽 논쟁

Abstract

This paper explores the debates between Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke on the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Shocked by Richard Price's sermon that applauded the French Revolution, Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), criticized the horrible effects of the Revolution. Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) took her cue against Burke in that she considered the Revolution as a timely opportunity to establish human rights, equality between men and women, liberty, and philanthropy on English soil. The disagreements of Wollstonecraft and Burke hinge on the different interpretations of the Enlightenment philosophy. Burke, the forerunner of conservatism, founds his aesthetics and politics on “common sense” and “natural feelings”: that is, on nature. This maneuver of Burke secures an unchangeable origin that is designed to rationalize the questionable hierarchy among people. Burke proposes “prescription” as an antidote against the Revolution whose base is the enlightenment philosophy. Wollstonecraft, on the contrary, foregrounds Burke's ideologies of anti-feminism, power-politics, and violence. Wollstonecraft as a radical Enlightenment thinker constructs a progressive relation of reason and feeling, moral virtue, educational system, and a new relation between men and women based on friendship. In this way, Wollstonecraft cultivates the grounds for feminism and democracy, which are anathemas to Burke.