Abstract
In giving a thoroughly Christian theological reading of the work of late eighteenth-century thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, this book may be the first monograph of its kind. Emily Dumler-Winckler situates Wollstonecraft’s thought within the major debates of her own day and shows how her thinking fills gaps in our own.
The main title, Modern Virtue, suggests the primary debates Dumler-Winckler hopes to engage: whether ethical categories like virtue and common good survived into modernity, and whether reviving premodern virtue traditions is a good thing. Dumler-Winckler highlights two dominant contemporary narratives about virtue. Virtue’s defenders worry about moral pluralism in the modern era, arguing that “modern rights are mere fairy tales that have eclipsed premodern virtues, rendering the common good obsolete” (p. 29). For defenders, the revival of virtue depends on returning to premodern traditions. Contrariwise, virtue’s despisers worry that virtue traditions make essential that which is contingent and require “uncritical adherence” to norms “circumscribed by inherently violent normative regimes” (p. 28).
For Dumler-Winckler, Wollstonecraft dissolves this impasse. She avoids the concerns of virtue’s defenders because her position is morally realist: “certain moral principles are discernible, and . . . find a standard in the ‘immutable attributes of God’” (p. 41). But her thinking also accounts for the socially constructed nature of human knowledge which virtue’s despisers rightly worry is too often obscured by virtue talk: “these ‘immutable’ attributes are not given in advance of dispute or ethical inquiry” (p. 41). Virtues are real in that they point up attributes of the God we imitate in Christ; virtues are socially constructed in that our perception of those same attributes can become warped, leading us to confuse semblances of virtue for the real thing. These warped judgments result in the domination of women by men and of the poor and working classes by the rich. We must therefore submit our moral and religious traditions and exemplars to critical scrutiny and take responsibility for (re)tailoring them in our own day. Thus, the subtitle: A Tradition of Dissent. Any moral discourse about virtues must include debate about who defines, lists, and is able to discern rightly those virtues.
Dumler-Winckler’s knowledge is immense. She situates Wollstonecraft’s thought within the major debates of her day. Significant among these are her exchanges with Edmund Burke about taste and the French Revolution. Dumler-Winckler draws on everything from Wollstonecraft’s reviews, essays, and fiction to noting which of her contemporaries she quoted with unusual length. The engagement with other sources is equally impressive. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Judith Butler, Stanley Hauerwas, Katie Cannon—all these and more are here.
This is a thoroughly academic book and not for a general audience. As Dumler-Winckler herself notes, “Christian and virtue ethicists, moral and political theologians, and feminists of various stripes” will benefit most from it (p. 30). She engages Wollstonecraft scholars throughout, but significant prior knowledge of Wollstonecraft is not necessary. A benefit of the book’s scope is that readers with varied academic interests—feminism, history, Christian theology, ethics, and so on—will find entrée into its argument. Clergy with an academic bent may find its account of the virtues pastorally informative for preaching, but not without some work.
The book’s only weaknesses are some confusing organizational decisions. These are minor but sometimes leave the reader feeling as though we’ve missed something. For example, one nine-page section is entitled “The Fairest Virtues”: Benevolence, Friendship, and Generosity (pp. 245–253). The dominant theme in the first half is benevolence; the dominant theme in the second half is friendship. The reader therefore expects a third portion on generosity, but there is none and the book moves on.
Another example is how the book presents one of its main goals. Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft offers an alternative to the competing narratives of virtue’s defenders and despisers (p. 6). When explicating the second of these terms, Dumler-Winckler tells us that the despisers are actually “despisers and designers” (p. 8). Both despisers and designers reject dominant accounts of virtue, but they are distinct groups (pp. 9–11). Because of this setup, it is sometimes unclear when despisers refers to a group that includes designers and when the term refers to a group that is distinct from both defenders and designers. Dumler-Winckler distinguishes her project from all three, so why not say from the beginning that defending, despising, and designing are three distinct contemporary approaches, and that in Modern Virtue we have a fourth?
Again, these are minor critiques of organization. The book succeeds in its argument and is no doubt a major step in carving out for Mary Wollstonecraft a place in the canon of Christian theological ethics.
