Abstract
Abstract
Chapter 2 examines two ethical conflicts and the tragicomic nature of each: the revolution in France, and Burke and Wollstonecraft’s dispute about its significance. Burke portrays the French Revolution as a tragicomic scene. Wollstonecraft demonstrates in equally dramatic modes that Burke is mistaken about the nature and extent of the revolutionary tragedy. Still, she prevents their dispute from devolving into a culture war or tragic conflict, exemplifying practices of accountability and contestation needed to sustain democratic societies in the midst of sociopolitical revolutions. The Revolution debates of the 1790s distill modern ethical conflicts that remain as significant in the 1970s as today. These intra-Protestant debates provide an important counterpoint to depictions of modernity as an epic battle of tastes between two opposing and incommensurable views, a Nietzschean tragedy or Christian comedy, hopeless pessimism or utopian optimism. The Revolution is better understood, Wollstonecraft suggests for different reasons than Burke, as a tragicomedy.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference645 articles.
1. Abbey, Ruth. “Are Women Human?: Wollstonecraft’s Defense of Rights for Women.” In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Eileen Hunt Botting, 229–245. Rethinking the Western Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
2. Back to the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft.;Hypatia,1999
3. Women’s Human Rights, Then and Now: Symposium on Eileen Hunt Botting’s Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights.;Political Theory
4. Moral Horror and the Sacred.;The Journal of Religious Ethics,1995