Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. This is the second in our series,

history of ideas. Today David talks about Mary Wollstonecraft's, a vindication of the rights of women, a book that came

out of the French Revolution, but was about so much more than that. Talking Politics, History of Ideas, is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of

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This talk is about a book that like a lot of the books and other pieces of writing I'm going to be discussing comes out of a time of political turmoil.

Political turmoil produces good writing about politics.

It was true for Hobbs, whom I talked about before. It was the turmoil of the English

Civil War and all that followed it that produced his greatest book. The event that this book comes out of is the French

revolution, another world-changing upheaval. It was not written by someone who comes from France. It's written by Mary

Wilston Craft from England, but she went to France and she was there during the revolution. Not all of it, but its most dangerous phase.

There isn't a huge connection between this book and what I had to say about Hobbs but there is some and I just want to

sketch that out before I talk about what Wollstonecraft had to say and why it matters.

It might seem odd to think that there's a connection between the French Revolution and Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy because Hobbes is known as the philosopher, not just of order, but of sucking up the order that you have. In the terms of Hobbes' argument, you are not

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