In the 2008 American electoral season it is hard not to relate to any treatment of a debate between Edmund Burke, a figure in whom latter-day conservatives of all stripes place some admiration, and an outspoken, accomplished advocate of women whose husband also was a well-known fixture of political arguments. The political fortunes of this moment will decide whether The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate augurs the outlines of the 2008 presidential contest, but there can be little doubt that the discourse of our contemporary politics reveals to us something of the debate engaged by this study. Indeed, the use of “debate” in this instance is telling, as the author does not assert (and cannot assert) that Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft ever engaged in something like a sustained exchange beyond Wollstonecraft's response to the Reflections in the Vindication of the Rights of Men. A “debate,” as such, never took place. Instead, the debate in question is a construction cobbled from Burke's and Wollstonecraft's divergent views of the French Revolution. In much the same way that political candidates today discuss the same issues while talking past one another, never engaging in what real debate demands, ultimately something is lacking in this quite learned but nevertheless somewhat forced treatment of two giants of eighteenth-century political thought who never actually quite come face-to-face in the way that this book suggests.

Daniel I. O’Neill is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, and his work to date on Burke, Wollstonecraft, and the Scottish Enlightenment is as impressive as it is perfectly placed in one of the fastest-running streams in political theory: determining the reach of thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment into the history of political ideas. Those figures associated with the Scottish Enlightenment—Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and a handful of others—are long settled by common agreement. The argument of this work, that “the clash between Burke and Wollstonecraft over the meaning of the French Revolution developed from a Scottish Enlightenment language of politics” (9), carries two heavy burdens of proof; even as it struggles against the fact that while Burke and Wollstonecraft surely perceived one another as adversaries, they far from engaged in debate. At once, O’Neill acknowledges that he must “demonstrate” the connection of Burke's political ideas “to the Scottish Enlightenment” (14) and, at the same time, holds that Wollstonecraft, who “rewrote the Scottish Enlightenment's entire history of manners,” had “fundamentally refashioned the Scots’ arguments” (18) and therefore also derived substantial inspiration from the Scottish Enlightenment.

The work O’Neill does to defend this core claim of his study is thorough, if not totally persuasive. For evidence of a problem, we need look no further than the fact that some 123 pages of this 304-page work—nearly half of it—are devoted to establishing these premises, in chapters proposing the thesis and arguing the cases for Burke's and Wollstonecraft's attachments to the Scottish Enlightenment. It is not so much that the work O’Neill does here lacks merit or that it is not an interesting approach to these two thinkers whose every word already has earned the attention of generations of scholars. But particularly because O’Neill needs this common debt to the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment to hold his argument together, the fact that so much work is required to make the case finally deflates some of the effect his careful construction should have upon the reader.

The temptation to see Burke in the light of the Scottish Enlightenment is understandable. Certainly Burke spoke the language of those figures, as surely as he corresponded with them. But we have the verdict of Robert Bisset's 1800 biography to assert that Burke had cooled to Hume and the Scots by the 1780s, a conclusion with which F. P. Lock concurred in his recent two-volume biography, Edmund Burke. That Burke had adapted the terms of the Scots “for his own purpose,” as O’Neill quotes C. P. Courtney on page 71, we ought not to doubt. Burke had cobbled together several different perspectives to form his political ideas, which accounts for the diffusion of his legacy across several interpretations. But the claim that Edmund Burke was a “fellow traveler in this effort” of the Scots’ “of articulating a ‘Science of Man’” (8) is as striking for its boldness as for the ideological ambition of such a project, which seems, in its scope, quite un-Burkean.

Luke Gibbons and others have alerted us to how Burke's view of history took account of progress, but more because of the looming prospects of decay in all four great causes of his career, the very “savagery” to which the title refers. Burke was far more preoccupied by the prospects of decline and decay, as we see him treat them in his engagements with India, America, Ireland, and France. Further, though O’Neill turns to Burke's placement of “the spirit of a gentleman” and “the spirit of religion” at the root of civilizing manners, and though he allows that Burke has made modifications to the Scots’ theories of civilization and history, his treatment of Christianity as “shap[ing] the civilizing process” (141) descends into a utilitarian explanation that does little to credit Burke's esteem for religion. O’Neill raises provocative questions about Burke's relationship with the Scots, but the demands of his thesis prevent him from entirely following through.

Overall, the treatment of Wollstonecraft is quite perceptive, and to a large degree O’Neill bears out why we might place her into dialogue with Burke. Yet the claims of Wollstonecraft's connection to the Scots are even more strained than Burke’s. For Wollstonecraft—and entirely unlike the Scots—civilization “derived from … bringing reason to bear on a given field of human endeavor” (121). Though, like Burke, Wollstonecraft spoke in some of the same terms as the Scots, she must be defined by her opposition to them for the link to be fully sensible. The strength of O'Neill's treatment of Wollstonecraft lies in his analysis of her response to Burke's gendered thinking, but this is not entirely new ground. Without a more durable connection between either figure and the Scots, however, the clash between conservatism and feminism is what remains.

This book should be read. O’Neill has given great and creditable effort to bringing these figures into fresh focus. If the overall effect is not so persuasive as he may wish, the questions about Burke and Wollstonecraft raised by this study, and its suggestion of a boundary beyond which the Scots’ influence does not extend, remain valuable.