ABSTRACT
In order to understand Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of rights well, it is useful to first position her within a philosophical context of interventions about rights. The role that the notion of natural and morally pre-existing rights came to play in the defence of the developments in France displays a political dynamite accompanying, and that was something that had not been evident before. The lack of recognition of the infinite variations of civil arrangement that Burke found to be a crucial flaw in the natural rights account is, Paine insists, its very point. Civil rights are the aggregate of the natural rights of all men and pertain to those things in relation to which the power of the individual man is insufficient, such as security against attack. Since Wollstonecraft held rights to be natural, and legitimate power to be conditioned and limited, the argument from artificiality would have been close to hand.
