ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s concept of liberty as independence and of the intellectual context within which her approach to liberty is developed. It examines Wollstonecraft’s concept of independence but it should be remembered that what she has to say about rights, moral action, political organization, property, marriage, revolution, representation and so forth, are all implications of her theory of liberty. One import of religion in eighteenth-century republican theory is the perfection of reason that God represents. That is why it appears so obviously true to Price and Wollstonecraft that submitting to the power of God is tantamount to retaining perfect freedom. Both Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner have placed Wollstonecraft within the republican or ‘neo-Roman’ tradition of thinking about what it is for a person to be free, but have not subjected the matter to analysis. S. McMillen Conger attributes to Wollstonecraft the view that ‘freedom is finally a state of mind’.
