ABSTRACT
In her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft identified herself as the owner of “a philosophical eye”. This paper traces Wollstonecraft’s engagement with, and debt to, contemporary historical writing, particularly that of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her book reviews and the two Vindications show her familiarity with such work, and her interest in histories of “civilisation” which could also incorporate progressive histories of improvement in the condition of women. Contemporaries noted her ambition to write as a historian in the View, and it was here that she explicitly discussed the complex relationship between commercial civilisation and its manners, and the pursuit of political liberty and political virtue. Her view of material progress was ambivalent, in the doubts she expressed on the progress of manufacture and industry, though her call for the development of an enlightened political science, as committed to the transformation of manners as of political institutions, was clearly expressed. Her recognition of the significance of this historical perspective was one which she shared with many middle-class British Whigs and radicals by 1793.
