ABSTRACT
What is it that we do when we reach into history, trying to think another person’s thoughts? It is impossible, surely; all we have to go on is what they chose to or happened to leave behind. I said, in the introduction to this book, that I have resisted the temptation – if that is the right word – to use biographical details about Wollstonecraft’s life as clues to her philosophy. Her emphasis on the lived experience, on the qualitative feel of life and her use of these experiences as sources of knowledge about freedom and morality, is part of her method for doing philosophy. That does not make us free to exploit her own personal experiences and feelings or things that she did and said in her own life, as if her philosophy can be good philosophy only if she lived it consistently. I feel that I have to keep saying this, and there is no escaping the fact that I have to keep saying it largely because Wollstonecraft was what political thinkers of the past are not really supposed to be: a woman. When a journalist recently interviewed me about Wollstonecraft, the first question that I was asked was: ‘She had a lot to say about family life and marriage, but what was her own love life like?’ I know that I risk repeating a point made with patient and slightly bored regularity by feminists when I say that I have never had a similar question posed to me about Hobbes or Hume.
