The Tyranny of Dead Men
Burke's argument from prescription holds that the very antiquity of an institution is evidence of its wisdom. It has survived; it has been tested; it embodies the accumulated experience of generations. Wollstonecraft's reply is that this confuses persistence with justice. An institution can survive for centuries precisely because those it oppresses lack the power to overthrow it — not because it serves the common good.
India and the Caste Analogy
Wollstonecraft draws an analogy that would have startled Burke's readers: the same argument from tradition and inherited role that Burke uses to defend English hereditary institutions could equally be used to defend the Indian caste system. A Brahmin, she observes, could find many arguments from precedent and custom for confining a man to the profession of his lineal forefathers. If prescription cannot justify caste, it cannot justify hereditary privilege at home.
The same arguments might be used in India, if any attempt were made to bring back things to nature, to prove that a man ought never to quit the cast that confined him to the profession of his lineal forefathers. The Bramins would doubtless find many ingenious reasons to justify this debasing, though venerable prejudice; and would not, it is to be supposed, forget to observe that time, by interweaving the oppressive law with many useful customs, had rendered it for the present very convenient, and consequently legal.
Reason as the Living Standard
Against the authority of the past, Wollstonecraft sets the authority of reason — not abstract speculation but the lived rational capacity of living human beings. Each generation must be able to subject the institutions it inherits to rational scrutiny and to reform or discard what fails that scrutiny. This is not arrogance but the basic requirement of self-governance. A society that cannot question its past is not free; it is governed by the dead.
The caste analogy and the critique of prescription appear in the Rights of Men (1790). Wollstonecraft's argument was taken up and extended by Thomas Paine in Rights of Man (1791), which appeared the following year.
Related Concepts
