In Praise of Grand Historical Narratives

Abstract: The long eighteenth century was a good time for history and historians. This article considers one of its most original genres, conjectural history, and of one of conjectural history’s most interesting subjects, woman. What made the conjectural history of woman most interesting was not only that it brought together all the elements that were themselves the subjects of theoretical histories, such as language, the arts and sciences, society, religion, and man, but continued to matter politically well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, one might argue that it continues to shape understandings of what it means to be civilized to this day. Following some observations on some of the challenges such a history presented to its practitioners, the essay turns to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan and his contestation of the eighteenth-century view of the history of woman. It ends with some reflections on the importance of revisiting such histories. Keywords: historiography; conjectural history; women’s history; long eighteenth century; Friedrich Engels; August Bebe

Review Essay of Queenly Philosophers: Renaissance Women Aristocrats as Platonic Guardians and Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays

Review Essay of Queenly Philosophers: Renaissance Women Aristocrats as Platonic Guardians and Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essay

Revolution in Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Sylvana Tomaselli, St. John's College, Cambridg

Economic equality in Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Sylvana Tomaselli, St. John's College, Cambridg

'Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?': The Platonism of Mary Wollstonecraft

Together with David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft thought modern commercial society exacerbated the psychological need of most of their members to seek the approbation of others. Like them, she thought the better part of her contemporaries were caught in a hall of mirrors and sought to be esteemed for their appearance. In her view the contrivances this entailed distorted individual characters, relationships, and society as a whole. Though she partook of a European wide philosophical debate, she came to it from the very unique perspective of a largely self-taught English woman and in a large part from what might be meaningfully conceived as a Platonist perspective. In examining how this might be so, this chapter does not seek to make Wollstonecraft a Platonist as opposed to, say, an Aristotelian, much less a Christian. Her moral and political critique made her eclectic in her use of ideas and argument. She seems however to have been inspired by conceptions of the soul, love, truth and virtue that have their origins in Platonism. Considering her in this light provides greater insights into her philosophy of mind as well as her social and political views and provides a greater understanding of the continued importance of Platonism in the latter part of the eighteenth century