Following many prominent political theorists, such as Sheldon Wolin and Richard Ashcraft, Daniel I. O'Neill suggests that political turmoil is the occasion for great political theory. In his recent book, O'Neill demonstrates that the French Revolution was the occasion for Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft to articulate their political theories more fully. Burke's treatise condemning the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France, was met by Mary Wollstonecraft's spirited response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. O'Neill suggests that Wollstonecraft's subsequent treatises, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, should also be read as her further response to Burke. Burke would also continue to write and speak against the revolution as events unfolded. These writings on the French Revolution explore the very meaning of modernity and would become fundamental to our contemporary notions of conservatism and feminism. In order to better understand the different arguments each thinker makes about the revolution and democracy, O'Neill returns to the Scottish Enlightenment. He argues that both Burke and Wollstonecraft were influenced by the moral sense philosophy and the historical narrative that occupied so many thinkers associated with the Enlightenment. However, both commentators on the French Revolution “fundamentally transformed that language of politics for their own purposes” (p. 9).

O'Neill begins his study with a brief introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment and then devotes two chapters to Burke's and Wollstonecraft's understandings of the central tenets of this school. The following two chapters examine their condemnation and defense of the French Revolution, respectively, and the final two chapters elaborate their understandings of democracy, which informed their reactions. For Burke, the revolution and the appeal to abstract principles that justified it flagrantly disregarded human sentiments and the historical institutions that had brought about European civilization. Human beings could not and should not eradicate their political bonds and begin entirely anew. Any attempt to do so, such as the French Revolution, promised a return to savagery. For Wollstonecraft, political life is forged through reason, not sentimental attachments. The revolution would ensure greater equality and freedom for all human beings and, she hoped, particularly for women. Democracy, which would be the consequence of the revolution, would be the culmination of civilization, not its demise. O'Neill concludes his work with some reflections on the continued relevance of Burke's political theory to conservatism and Wollstonecraft's political theory to feminism.

O'Neill's reading of Burke (and, to a much lesser extent, Wollstonecraft) is compromised by his own steadfast adherence to a single conception of democracy. By democracy, O'Neill means “deep democracy,” which extends to both public and private spheres, eliminating any hierarchy among citizens and distinctions among family members. According to his interpretation, both Burke and Wollstonecraft understood the democratization of the private sphere as necessarily accompanying the democratization of the public. Burke dreaded it while Wollstonecraft eagerly anticipated it. From the outset of O'Neill's work, it is evident to the reader that Burke is quite simply on the wrong side of history. To be sure, Burke opposed democracy. He was the outspoken critic of Whigs, who sought to increase their power by expanding the electorate. But, he also opposed despotism. He defended the American colonialists, the Irish Catholics, and the Indians against the claims of the British crown. Although Burke did not subscribe to abstract rights, he was a defender of the rights that were born of law and custom. Lost in O'Neill's work is Burke's historical and philosophical opposition to the arbitrary abuse of political power. Burke's commitment to political reform tempers his “white-hostility to deep democracy” (p. 10) and it complicates O'Neill's interpretation.

O'Neill's interpretation of Burke prevents him from pursuing fundamental theoretical questions occasioned by the French Revolution. The promise of democracy rapidly degenerated into the brutal and gruesome Terror. O'Neill recognizes Burke's foreboding at the outset of the revolution: “What was the ‘monstrous fiction’ at the heart of the French Revolution, before which its king trembled?” (p. 152) O'Neill answers that it was the transformation of “docile subjects into fearless participatory citizens…. Burke watched in horror as the democratic swine ran amok” (p. 152). Likening the people to swine offends our democratic sensibilities, but likening the revolutionaries to “participatory citizens” offends our better judgment. In his introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France, J. G. A. Pocock has argued that by the end of his life, Burke understood that at the heart of the French Revolution was a theory of totalitarianism (p. xxxviii). Absent any social restraints, the revolutionary intelligentsia is free to pursue its own power in the name of an abstract principle. The French Revolution and the Terror that ensued presaged the brutal totalitarianism of the twentieth century. O'Neill disagrees with Pocock on this point, arguing instead that Burke dreaded not so much the social engineering as “the substantive content of the ideal in the heads of the desperate social engineers driving the French Revolution”—“deep democracy” (p. 201). However, it would be inconsistent with Burke's political theory to allow for social engineering for the sake of another ideal. O'Neill misses this opportunity to contemplate the relationship between the appeal to abstract principle and the means by which that ideal can, if ever, be realized. Although he takes another opportunity when examining Wollstonecraft's reaction to the Terror, Burke's wisdom is too quickly passed over.

O'Neill makes two particularly important contributions to the scholarship on Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft is often seen as correcting Rousseau's hyper-sentimental account of woman with Lockean rationalism. By examining her engagement with Scottish Enlightenment treatments of moral sense philosophy and stages of history, O'Neill reveals Wollstonecraft's lively mind and the complexity of her thought. He demonstrates that her anticipation of democracy brought by the French Revolution stems from her consideration of Enlightenment principles. When the blood of the aristocracy literally flowed beneath her feet in the streets, she had the philosophical recourse to ponder the stark juxtaposition between the aspirations of the revolution and its practices. O'Neill quotes Wollstonecraft: “The strongest conviction of reason cannot quickly change a habit of body; much less the manners that have been gradually produced by certain modes of thinking and acting” (p. 247). Guided by the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft's appraisal of the revolution is prudent and statesmanlike (and, I might add, a little bit Burkean).

The consideration of Wollstonecraft's reaction to the French Revolution and to the Terror leads to O'Neill's second extremely important contribution, not only to the scholarship on Wollstonecraft but to the study of the history of political theory. The author admirably demonstrates that Wollstonecraft is of interest to those who study political and democratic theory, not only to those who ponder “the woman question.” Yet, as he knows and shows his readers throughout his treatment of the Enlightenment, Burke, and Wollstonecraft, the woman question cannot be so easily separated from the study of political theory and is of central importance to it. O'Neill's consideration of her political theory, occasioned by the French Revolution, vindicates Wollstonecraft, once dubbed “the hyena in petticoats” for her attack on Burke, and enriches the study of political theory.