Mary Wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust

ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft is increasingly being recognized as a philosopher who made a noteworthy contribution to moral and political philosophy. Her work not only encompassed political treatises, such as the now well-known A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also fiction. This article demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s work comprised three main ways of engaging with trust, namely distrust, virtuous trust, and open trust. It puts these three forms of trust into context with Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent relation to the 18^th-century culture of sensibility. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s open form of trust is compared with the 20^th-century Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup’s conception of trust. Løgstrup regarded genuine trust as a spontaneous, basic phenomenon that was not rooted in moral reasoning. While there are some similarities between Wollstonecraft’s open trust and Løgstrup’s understanding of trust, Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of ‘an educated heart’, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason. Accordingly, this article offers some insight into how we may perceive Wollstonecraft’s strong rejection of Edmund Burke’s ‘inbred sentiments’, that is, Burke’s belief in innate, benign moral instincts.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• trust
• fiction
• sensibility
• reason
• K. E. Løgstrup

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Joseph William Sterrett, Jakob Ladegaard, Esther Oluffa Pedersen, Elizabeth Xiao-an Li, as well as the anonymous journal reviewer who offered insightful comments and suggestions in the development of this article. I would also like to thank my dear friend and former boyfriend, Kristian Danielsen, through whom I have learned the true value of trust and love. For this I will be you forever grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Arman Teymouri Niknam

Arman Teymouri Niknam, PhD project at Aarhus University deals with trust in the literature and political thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. Arman is a part of the Trust and Risk in Literature Network, which seeks to increase awareness about trust and risk theories in literature studies. He has previously conducted studies in England, as a visiting PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, and as an Associate Graduate Student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Arman has a Master’s degree in English and Philosophy from Roskilde University, Denmark.