Two writers, One Common Strategy

The late great Christopher Hitchens once offered the insightful observation that a frequent modus operandi seen in radical polemics is to “assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one” (Hitchens 130-38). Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in Reflections on the Revolution in France and A Vindication of the Rights of Men respectively, operate no differently, refusing in their polemical attacks to address the possibility that the other side may just be as morally minded as themselves in their the reasons to support or not support revolution and the ascertaining of human rights. 

For instance, Burke, after offering a withering critique of the arrest of the Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, castigates the philosophy of the Jacobites who would begin France anew, as if without historical memory, the wisdom of such an endeavor that Burke himself leaves in no uncertain terms: “On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests” (Burke 115). Worried that once institutions of authority are dismissed entirely, Burke agues that what must follow is a kind of relativistic notion of right and wrong among the citizens, something that in incommensurate with an orderly society.  Such acerbic prose as Burke’s, however skillful, nevertheless remains woefully unconcerned with several other important values in writing, like for instance fairness or generosity to one’s adversary’s, making for a polemical strategy that was probably meant to appeal more to those who already held his opinions. 

Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is just as guilty of being uncharitable in her polemic, taking nearly every opportunity to impugn Burke’s character rather than remaining focused on the dismantling of his arguments on their own terms: “All your pretty flights arise from your pampered sensibility; and that, vain of this fancied pre-eminence of organs, you foster every emotion till fumes, mounting to your brain, dispel the sober suggestions of reason” (Wollstonecraft 119). One can only wonder what Wollstonecraft really thought of Burke. And yet, the appreciation of each writer’s polemic depends precisely on just such moments of rhetorical flourish and character assassination. As skilled rhetorically as each writer clearly was, they certainly could have decided to write in a style suggesting greater sobriety and disinterestedness on their part. However, they likely were less concerned with suggesting impartiality than they were in the rousing up of the sentiments of their political base, a strategy that journalists, activists, and politicians traditionally have turned to to win the public’s approbation, however intellectually dishonest such a tactic might be.

This is not to suggest, however, that neither writer fails to present good evidence for their arguments or foregoes the use of logic in favor of purely emotional appeals. Burke, for instance, reminds us of the importance of thinking of tradition as a form of collective wisdom rather than merely the outdated opinions of the dead: “Society in indeed a contract...a partnership....between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Burke 118). This idea also calls to mind Chesterton’s famous formulation of the same idea two centuries later, that “tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Both men recognize that more unbelievable than things in society going wrong are things going right, and the taking down of long-standing institutions with great rashness will surely have unintended consequences.

The danger of holding tradition with such deep reverence, however, is the possibility of ignoring or condoning social evils that have a very real chance of being eliminated, given the right combination of reforms and visionary thinking, something pointed out most strongly by Wollstonecraft when she attacks the insensitivity of Burke’s idea of the poor relying on the hope of the afterlife in the face of today’s injustices: “Where is the eye that marks these evils, more gigantic than any of the infringements of property, which you piously deprecate? Are these remedies evils? And is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world, to receive the blessings this could afford?” For Wollstonecraft, in other words, Burke’s attitude is too callous toward the less fortunate and patently absurd in light of his being so upset for someone like Mary Antoinette, a person who has lived a life of luxury that most everyone else can only dream about. In sum, both writers present emotionally resonating cases for their points of view about the French Revolution and the rights of man, relying on similar strategies of ad hominem attacks and rhetorical flourish for the most part, but not without being combined with well-reasoned arguments that are frequently supplemented by strong emotional appeals designed to rouse their political base.