Reason Against Sentiment

Wollstonecraft's opening attack on Burke is personal and pointed: she identifies him as a man of lively imagination and brilliant rhetoric whose very fluency is a political danger. The capacity to dazzle an audience is not a capacity to reason clearly about justice. A politician who substitutes eloquence for argument, and sentiment for principle, is precisely the kind of thinker who will defend beautiful tyrannies against ugly liberties.

Burke's central political move is to argue that the attachments of feeling — to custom, to tradition, to the familiar face of authority — are more politically reliable than abstract rational principles. Wollstonecraft counters that sentiment, unguided by reason, is precisely the faculty that has always sustained oppression. The peasant's sentimental attachment to his lord, the subject's reverence for the king's majesty, the woman's devotion to her husband's will — all are products of cultivated feeling, not of rational judgment.

Against Burke's aesthetics of politics, Wollstonecraft insists on principle: the question of whether an institution is just cannot be answered by how long it has existed or how nobly it presents itself. It can only be answered by subjecting it to rational scrutiny — asking whether it serves the rights and welfare of all its subjects, including those whose suffering Burke's elegant prose has nothing to say about. Reason is not cold or inhuman; it is the faculty that allows us to extend our concern beyond those we find beautiful.

The critique of Burke's sentiment runs throughout the Rights of Men. Wollstonecraft's argument prefigures Mary Poovey's later analysis of Wollstonecraft's own rhetorical strategies, and anticipates themes in Kant's critical distinction between moral feeling and moral reason.