Mary Wollstoncraft. I diritti degli uomini. Risposta alle "Riflessioni sulla rivoluzione francese" di Edmund Burke (Italian version only)
Casalini Brunella (edited by)

In this political pamphlet, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) responds to Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”. From the point of view of public success, more unlucky than Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man”, and condemned to lie in the shadow of the later “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792), “Vindication of the Rights of Men” is an important work for the experimentation of the ideas that were to be completed in her later work. Despite the fact that she does not yet speak in the name of women, Wollstonecraft shows the question of gender to lie at the centre of her attentions. For the first time in this pamphlet, the author identifies the fundaments of the power order that upholds the old regime in sexual as well as class subordination. If we talk of the rights of men, and not the rights of women, on the other hand, it is implicit that this expression must be understood as a synonym of the rights of humanity. The militant tone of this 1790 work anticipates the tone used in the second Vindication, and highlights her impossibility of separating the debate on women from her “Republican agenda” and her social radicalism. The series “Methexis - Studi e Testi”, which publishes works on political philosophy and similar subjects, is linked to the Methexis project, aiming at a wider diffusion and participation in knowledge using telematic instruments. For this reason, the studies and texts published on paper are also reproduced in digital format in the telematic Bulletin of Political Philosophy (http://bfp.sp.unipi.it/ebooks) and other sites that participate in this initiative. The series makes use of a scientific committee, which is currently composed of Giuliano Marini, Roberto Gatti, Salvatore Veca, Gianluigi Palombella, Armando Rigobello, Claudio Palazzolo, Danilo Zolo, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Michele Nicoletti and Roberto Giannetti.

Brunella Casalini, confirmed political philosophy researcher, is currently a lecturer in History of political doctrines at the Faculty of Political science in Florence. Among her recent publications, we may recall “Nei limiti del compasso. Locke e le origini della cultura politica e costituzionae americana”, Mimesis, Milano 2002.