‘The Great Distinction of Our Nature’: Imagination and Commerce in the Later Wollstonecraft

Abstract

This article elucidates a central but underexplored theme in Wollstonecraft's later writing: the distinction between the imagination and commerce. After the French Terror, Wollstonecraft begins to write of the imagination, rather than reason, as the defining feature of human nature. It is the imagination, she argues, that will enable the continuation of civilisational progress in the face of the retrogressive forces of commerce. This article argues that Wollstonecraft distinguishes between the two in accordance with three areas of concern: the distinction between humans and animals; the difference between higher and lower pleasures; the distinction between self-interest and social being. It also argues that Wollstonecraft's perspective in these three areas is shaped by her particular intellectual background, that is, by her reading of Rousseau, her civic humanism, and by her Socratic ethics.