Abstract

Reading Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society as targeting Rousseau insinuates continuity between Burke’s preoccupations in that work and his later opposition to Rousseau as supposedly also based on radical state-of-nature arguments. But neither contextual nor intra-textual evidence supports any Rousseau—Vindication connection, and the putative link implicitly misreads Burke’s preoccupation in the Vindication , the grounds of his critique of Rousseau, and the role Burke ascribes to the latter in the revolution. The real target of the Vindication was Bolingbroke’s application of philosophical rationalism to religion. This kind of argument he only later came to see applied to politics. Burke’s later opposition to Rousseau is based not on the revolutionaries’ (dubious) claim that Rousseau endorsed their radical state-of-nature and natural rights discourse, but on Rousseau’s espousal of a new moral psychology opposed to Christian deontology. This was the ‘revolution in manners’ which made the revolution possible and for which Rousseau provided a philosophical underpinning