Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent

In this rigorous, well-written book, Emily Dumler-Winckler re-introduces the reader to the theological and philosophical thought of the late 18th century British women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft. As Dumler-Winckler points out in the introduction, her central aim in this re-turn to Wollstonecraft is to think differently about the relationship between tradition and dissent. Instead of pitting these concepts against each other, where tradition is inherently conservative and dissent marks a simple opposition to tradition, Dumler-Winckler claims that “dissent is tradition bound in the sense that dissenters use certain insights of a tradition or traditions to challenge or supplement other arguments, claims, and practices within those traditions” (5). By bringing together tradition and dissent, Dumler-Winckler is able to “offer an alternative to two influential and competing narratives about the virtues in modernity” (6)—one from the virtue defenders (Hauerwas and MacIntyre) who argue that modernity, liberal democracy, and the regime of rights undermine the ability to live a virtuous life; the other from the virtue haters who associate virtue-talk with attempts to deny and preserve systems of power and domination. Wollstonecraft helps us circumvent these alternatives as her writings acknowledge that “relations and systems of domination distort our concepts and cultivation of the virtues, and virtues are integral to just sociopolitical transformation” (12). Not unlike Jeff Stout's Democracy and Tradition, Dumler-Winckler's interpretation of Wollstonecraft refuses the false dichotomies between modernity and virtue, rights and goods, or dissent and authority.But her book is also a response to the ways that women too often get written out of certain discourses within the academy. Responding particularly to a predicament in which Wollstonecraft “remains almost entirely unknown in the fields of theology, religious studies, religious ethics, and specifically Christian ethics,” Dumler-Winckler seeks to “remedy this unhappy omission . . . [and] include Wollstonecraft in the theological and religious studies canon” (13). And perhaps through her engagement with the proto-feminist thinker, the text seeks to correct tendencies to reduce women to biography, marginal figures, or figures in history that have little to contribute to theoretical, normative discussions about ethics, theology, politics, and so forth. Anyone who reads this book will be astonished (and perhaps angered) by the fact that Wollstonecraft hasn't been a key thinker in discussions about modernity, virtue, dissent, domination, and so forth.If Modern Virtue is about Wollstonecraft's interventions into discussions about taste, the tragic, revolution, virtue, justice, and love, it is also about putting her in conversation with an array of thinkers who have thought about these subject matters—Burke, Rousseau, Judith Butler, Alasdair MacIntyre, Lisa Tessman, Katie Cannon, Melanie Harris, and Thelathia Nikki Young. Dumler-Winckler takes the reader on a journey, beginning with Wollstonecraft's fraught relationship with Edmund Burke on matters such as taste, judgement, and virtue. In response to the Enlightenment's “racialized stage theory of civilization,” Wollstonecraft teaches her readers to find virtue in “the ordinary, lowly, and outcast” (71). Similarly, she argues that virtue and judgement can be both rooted in tradition and out of line with social consensus and hegemonic perspectives. This interplay between rootedness in tradition and the cultivation of dissent in opposition to domination gets articulated in Wollstonecraft's reading of the French Revolution and her disagreements with Burke regarding the proper dispositions toward tradition and inheritance. While Burke underscores the importance of wrestling with one's inheritance, Wollstonecraft “emphasizes the limits of inheritance for charting a way forward” (115). While she agrees with Burke about the significance of piety, she parts ways with him when the latter's “principle does not inspire the kinds of institutional, systemic, or radical change required to abolish slavery, primogeniture, and other injustices” (115).Dumler-Winckler is well aware that the language of virtue can spell (gender) trouble, especially when women are under the burden to display the “sexed semblances” of virtue such as “submissive charms, fearful silent endurance, and Stoic acquiescence in the face of domination” (156). In conversation with Hegel and Butler's concerns about the grammar of virtue, she contends that Wollstonecraft challenges the idea that virtue is “moralizing, one-sided, hypocritical, and unwilling to confess or reconcile” (156). What is crucial here is the distinction between true virtues and semblances, false imitations of virtue that dupe, deceive, and lead astray. In addition, Dumler-Winckler draws attention to the proto-feminist's insistence that virtues are not divided by gender and sex (as they are for Burke and Rousseau). In other words, “the obligation to regulate (as well as enjoy) one's passions and appetites” is a human duty rather than a “sexual duty” (166). Consequently, for Wollstonecraft, “virtues are neither determined by, nor completely disconnected from sexual and bodily distinctions, roles, and relations” (166; emphases original). And as Dumler-Winckler underscores, Wollstonecraft's understanding of what it means to imitate God informs “her denial of sexed virtues, her affirmation of human virtues” (175).In addition to re-thinking taste, virtue, and tradition, Wollstonecraft provides resources to reconceive of justice as a practice and aim that involves both virtues and rights. According to Dumler-Winckler, the 18th century British thinker would push back against an author like MacIntyre, who worries that the regime of liberalism and the grammar of rights leave people with very little to say about what they stand for (rather than what they are protesting against). MacIntyre's concerns are very familiar—while people, especially academics, are good at criticizing, protesting, and deconstructing norms and conventions, they are purportedly less adept at putting forth constructive proposals and alternative goods. In response to these typical criticisms, Dumler-Winckler contends that “Wollstonecraft and traditions of dissent [from 17th/18th century English dissenters to 20th century black US civil rights activists] reveal that protests seeking rights against oppression, injustice, domination, and tyranny, on the one hand, and claims for justice and liberty, on the other hand—however organized or sporadic—are two sides of the same coin” (190; emphases original). In the same way that the British proto-feminist challenges MacIntyre's account, she would also reveal the problems in an author like Phillip Pettit who describe liberal notions of rights in opposition to republican conceptions of virtue and freedom. For Wollstonecraft, the republican notion that liberty is the alternative to arbitrary power is compatible with a commitment to natural human rights. (Rights and virtues are both common goods that require cultivation and preservation in traditions that resist injustice and domination.) What is crucial here is that for Wollstonecraft, human rights are “sacred” and given by a god who is just, whose “divine power . . . is bound by the dictates of divine justice, mercy, love, and wisdom” (207).Love and friendship, alongside justice, are essential to civic and social flourishing according to Wollstonecraft. But as Dumler-Winckler points out, while Wollstonecraft (like Aquinas) promotes the virtues of benevolence and charity, she worries about the ways in which external acts of charity and philanthropy become a substitute for justice. Consequently, “she insists that true benevolence, like charity, requires not only almsgiving but relational and systemic justice” (249). Placing Wollstonecraft in conversation with an array of authors who have thought about love, justice, and political friendship, Dumler-Winckler draws attention to the British proto-feminist's emphasis on: “God's agapic love in Christ as the founding act of friendship,” the interplay between agape, philia, and eros, a difficult openness to the stranger and the enemy, and the proper ordering of desire and love (285). This proper ordering, for example, prevents love of country from becoming a dangerous patriotism while also allowing human love to be perfected and transformed (occasionally by shame and disgust for a country's injustices). Love and justice are crucial for the author as they remind us that “absent virtues of justice and love, those who defeat despotism become despotic in victory” (295). Virtue and dissent must hang together in order to create an alternative to mechanisms of domination.Modern Virtue is a well-researched, eloquently written, and demanding text. Dumler-Winckler cogently shows that Wollstonecraft needs to be considered as a significant religious and ethical thinker in debates about modernity, virtue, political struggle, and so forth. In addition, the author successfully shows that we don't need to think of modernity and tradition, or dissent and virtue, as oppositional and antagonistic. One aspect that stands out in the text is the way Dumler-Winckler practices the virtues of charity and (agonistic) friendship with her many interlocutors. And yet, as with any rich and enriching text, its reader may be left with lingering questions and frictions. Here I am thinking of the aforementioned claim that systems of domination distort the virtues and yet virtues are necessary for social and political transformation. Could it be that the very inculcated desire to be good, to be virtuous, is what helps to sustain the order of things? Could it be that a different desire, a different drive, one that might be impossible, that is directed toward the wound, the split, the incompatible (clash of goods) needs to be cultivated alongside those goods that sustain and preserve social practices? While these questions might go beyond the text (but are enticed by the image of shattered glass in the concluding paragraph), Dumler-Winckler's scholarly achievement will generate such haunting questions while showing us that Wollstonecraft should be a guide in our interrogations and enquiries.