Wollstonecraft and the political value of contempt
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115593762 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Author | Ross Carroll |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(1) 26–46
! The Author(s) 2015
Wollstonecraft and the
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political value of contempt
DOI: 10.1177/1474885115593762
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Ross Carroll
The College of William & Mary, USA
Abstract
In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of
having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for
Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision
to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence
that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an inter-
pretation and defence of Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication
within eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best
methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same,
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The
first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social
elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an
abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their claims to dignity
may be unfounded. By contrast, the contempt Wollstonecraft directs at Burke repre-
sents a dignified withdrawal of esteem which signals that one’s opponent is unworthy of
the dignity to which they lay claim. If Wollstonecraft appeared to treat Burke abusively it
was because she came to consider this second form of contempt as an antidote to the
abusive contempt of the privileged. I conclude by spelling out some implications of
Wollstonecraft’s analysis of contempt for recent debates in political theory over the
importance of dignity to democracy.
Keywords
Wollstonecraft, contempt, ridicule, Burke, dignity
In the dramatic opening to her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary
Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of passing off ridicule as a ‘test of truth’
in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (Wollstonecraft, 1989, V: 9).1 Far
from leading his readers towards truth, she contended, Burke’s ridicule was
Corresponding author:
Ross Carroll, Department of Government, College of William & Mary, Morton Hall, 100 Ukrop Way,
Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA.
Email: rcarroll@wm.edu
Carroll
27
motivated by, and designed to elicit, nothing but contempt. The objects of that
contempt, in Wollstonecraft’s eyes, ranged from the poor, to the dissenting minister
Richard Price (whose sermon welcoming the revolution had served as the catalyst
for Burke’s polemic), to the members of the Assemble´e Nationale itself.2 Burke’s
repeated attempts to raise a ‘horse laugh,’ Wollstonecraft suggested, had far more
to do with despising his opponents as unworthy than with proving the truth of any
claim (Wollstonecraft, 1989, V: 7).3
Yet, as several readers of the Vindication have pointed out, Wollstonecraft’s
attack on Burke is itself laced with contempt, a contempt often expressed through
ridicule. Time and again she heaps mock pity on Burke’s ‘infantine sensibility,’
pleading that she must handle him delicately for fear that an overly rigorous debate
on a ‘metaphysical’ topic like the rights of man would ‘derange’ his ‘nervous
system’ (Wollstonecraft, 1989, V: 58 and 16).4 This was a contempt, moreover,
that she openly declared rather than insinuated. The Vindication mimicked the
epistle form of Burke’s Reflections, with Burke himself standing in as the letter’s
addressee. But in sharp contrast to the warm opening salutation with which Burke
greeted Charles-Jean-Francois Depont (his correspondent in Reflections), the
Vindication’s
greeting
placed Burke
firmly on guard.
In what follows,
Wollstonecraft warned, she will not only ‘express contempt’ for Burke but will
do so overtly, rather than concealing her feelings as the ‘equivocal idiom of polite-
ness’ recommended (Wollstonecraft, 1989, V: 7).
How are we to make sense of Wollstonecraft’s upbraiding of Burke for express-
ing contempt, on the one hand, and her unapologetic determination to do precisely
the same towards him, on the other? And what might answering this question
reveal about the place of contempt within her political project of the early
1790s? From the moment of its publication a matter of weeks after Burke’s
Reflections both sympathetic and hostile readers of the Vindication have agreed
that Wollstonecraft erred by choosing to match Burke’s contempt with one of her
own. A generous early critic in the English Review drew parallels between the
Vindication’s mode of attack and that of the Reflections, and worried that
Wollstonecraft would be accused of having ‘repaid’ Burke too much ‘in his own
coin’ (Anon., 1791a: 95). William Godwin, who in his own much earlier engage-
ment with Burke had been careful to combine criticism of his ‘principles’ with
respect for Burke’s character, called the work ‘too contemptuous and intemperate’
(1798: 76).5 More recent critics have concurred.6 Janet Todd even found something
of a double-standard at work in Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Burke’s ‘sarcasms,’
suggesting that ‘Burke’s attack on Price never stoops to the kind of personal abuse
that Wollstonecraft levels at Burke’ (Todd, 1999: 380). At best, it would seem,
Wollstonecraft’s contempt for Burke distracted from her arguments for the
rights of man and her defence of the revolutionary cause. At worst, it revealed
her to have been an injudicious or even wantonly abusive critic.
These criticisms of the Vindication, I aim to show, posit a misleading equivalence
between Wollstonecraft’s and Burke’s modes of address and in so doing occlude
the central role played by a particular understanding of contempt in
Wollstonecraft’s vision of an egalitarian social order. For Wollstonecraft’s
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European Journal of Political Theory 18(1)
eighteenth-century readers, to ‘contemn’ someone was to disdainfully regard them
as inferior in status or, worse, dismiss them as unworthy of regard at all.7 As such,
contempt most usually expressed and solidified social hierarchies to the benefit of
the elites at their summit.8 In responding to Burke the way she did, I argue,
Wollstonecraft contested this understanding and called attention to contempt’s
ambiguous relationship to social inequality. Far from countering Burke’s contempt
with an equal or harsher dose of the same, I maintain, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication
instead marked a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first, exemplified
by Burke’s attack on the poor, expressed the false sense of superiority experienced
by those who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family.
What is special about this form of contempt, as Wollstonecraft analysed it, is that it
represented both an abuse of social privilege and an anxious recognition among
elites that their claims to esteem are ultimately unfounded.
By contrast, in her response to Burke, Wollstonecraft strove to express a differ-
ent sort of contempt, one grounded in the conscious dignity of an independent
political agent. Those trained to express this form of contempt will not be cowed by
elite insolence and will prove capable of the kind of self-assertion Wollstonecraft
deemed vital to social and political freedom. If Wollstonecraft neglected to treat
Burke civilly or examine his arguments closely, I further claim, it was because she
came to consider this dignified contempt as itself an antidote to the abusive yet
anxiety-ridden contempt of the privileged. Though never shedding some early res-
ervations about contempt entirely, Wollstonecraft came in the 1790s to recognise
its value as a form of ‘active non-identification,’ that is, a way of signalling to
oneself and one’s audience that an opponent is unworthy of the dignity to which
they lay claim.9
I develop this argument in four stages. First, I show how many of the moral
philosophers, advice book authors, and educational theorists who influenced
Wollstonecraft took issue with the habitual contempt shown by the socially privi-
leged towards, in particular, domestic servants and the labouring poor. Two prin-
cipal strategies for countering this behaviour emerge from this literature. For the
likes of John Locke and James Burgh, such upper class contempt could best be
quelled by inculcating habits of civility and self-restraint among the children of the
rich from a young age. Others, however, such as Hester Chapone, proposed that
contempt, far from being an abuse only, very often betrayed profound psychic
insecurities among the privileged who relied upon it to extract tokens of homage
necessary to their fragile self-esteem. A dignified withholding of those tokens, she
further implied, could stifle their contempt just as effectively (if not more so) than
relying on elites’ own self-restraint.
I turn next to Wollstonecraft’s own educational program to show how she
borrowed from each of these lines of argument. In both her Thoughts on the
Education of Daughters and Female Reader, Wollstonecraft proposed that tutors
should encourage daughters of the gentry to shun contemptuous habits of speech
(particularly ridicule) as needlessly cruel and to regard such habits as signs of
dependence and insecurity. I show subsequently how from the early 1790s onwards
Wollstonecraft not only deepened this critique of elite behaviour but also urged a
Carroll
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comprehensive reconsideration of how esteem...
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