ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Mary Wollstonecraft’s engagement with the eighteenth-century group of thinkers and ideas collectively referred to as the Scottish Enlightenment. It begins with a general overview of the central Scottish Enlightenment concerns, focusing on the Scots’ broadly shared commitment to some version of moral intuitionism in philosophy combined with the belief in a narrative historiography of progress. It argues that by the end of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had been crucial in the construction of a culture of sensibility further embedded in a stadial theory of history, understood as a movement from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization,’ which they believed benefitted women as well as men. The paper’s two subsequent sections sketch Wollstonecraft’s knowledge of Scottish Enlightenment theories of moral philosophy and history, then move on to analyze her simultaneous deployment and critique of them in the course of her three most important works of political theory, the two Vindications and her history of the French Revolution. The essay argues that Wollstonecraft heavily criticized Scottish Enlightenment moral theory and effectively rewrote Scottish Enlightenment stadial history as a means of defending the French Revolution as the dawn of a new, more democratic civilization.
