“Since All the World is mad, why should not I be so?” Mary Astell on Equality, Hierarchy, and Ambition

Date01 December 2019
Published date01 December 2019
DOI10.1177/0090591719852040
Subject MatterArticles
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Article
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(6) 781 –808
“Since All the World is
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mad, why should not I
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be so?” Mary Astell on
Equality, Hierarchy,
and Ambition
Teresa M. Bejan1
Abstract
Ever since Mary Astell was introduced as the “First English Feminist” in 1986,
scholars have been perplexed by her dual commitments to natural equality
and social, political, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. But any supposed “paradox”
in her thought is the product of a modernist conceit that treats equality
and hierarchy as antonyms, assuming the former must be prior, normative,
and hostile to the latter. Seeing this, two other crucial features of Astell’s
thought emerge: her ethics of ascent and her psychology of superiority. These,
in turn, illuminate her lifelong fascination with ambition as a feminine virtue,
as well as her curious embrace of Machiavelli. Astell’s politics and ethics are
thus doubly worthy of recovery, both as the product of a singularly brilliant
early modern mind and as a fascinating but forgotten vision of “equality
before egalitarianism” that sheds light on the persistent complexities of
equality and hierarchy to this day.
Keywords
Mary Astell, Tory feminism, feminist political thought, equality, hierarchy,
ambition
1Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK
Corresponding Author:
Teresa M. Bejan, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford,
Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: teresa.bejan@politics.ox.ac.uk

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Political Theory 47(6)
Ever since Mary Astell (1666–1731)—philosopher, Tory polemicist, and
self-proclaimed “Lover of her Sex”—was introduced to modern audiences as
the “First English Feminist” in 1986, scholarly interest in her thought has
steadily grown.1 Still, across the fields of politics, philosophy, theology, lit-
erature, and history, all seem to agree: there is no early modern thinker more
“paradoxical,”2 whose work presents a more stubborn set of “conundrum[s],”
“tensions,” and outright “contradictions.”3
The precise nature of this paradox has been variously construed. As
scholars come to grips with the wider phenomenon of Tory feminism in
early modern England,4 superficial contrasts between Astell’s “feminism”
and “conservatism” have given way to more sophisticated readings.5 In
these, her 1706 reductio of John Locke’s Second Treatise nonetheless
remains exemplary: “If All Men are born free, how is that all Women are
born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant,
uncertain, unknown, and Arbitrary Will
of Men, be the perfect Condition
of Slavery
?”6 Given that Astell saw matrimony as more subjugal than
conjugal, this passage has been taken to represent a fundamental contra-
diction in her thought: between her commitment to natural equality (of
human beings, in general, and men and women, in particular), on the one
hand, and unremitting hierarchy (social, political, and ecclesiastical), on
the other.7
Of course, Astell would hardly be unique among early modern authors in
coupling egalitarian premises with hierarchical conclusions. Still, unlike
Thomas Hobbes, who went so far as to recast parental authority as a matter of
consent so as to “acknowledge” children’s natural equality consistently,8
Astell seems not to have recognized any tension, nor offered much justifica-
tion, egalitarian or otherwise, for her preferred hierarchical arrangements.
That this presents a problem in an early feminist, especially, has structured
much of her modern reception.9 As a woman writer widely celebrated in the
eighteenth century,10 Astell provides a paradigmatic example of the phenom-
enon of women’s “disappearing ink” diagnosed powerfully by Eileen
O’Neill.11 For historians of philosophy eager to induct her into a revised early
modern canon, then, the stakes of resolving Astell’s “paradox” seem particu-
larly high.12 At best, her defenses of unequal and subordinating relations
between husbands and wives, princes and subjects, and priests and parishio-
ners can be dismissed as matters of historical interest separable from her
philosophy, leaving it to modern scholars to trace the latter’s egalitarian
implications for her.13 At worst, they represent a failure to reason properly
from her own premises—an embarrassing lapse in a philosopher one would
elevate to the level of a Locke or a Leibniz, and for which one must make
apologies or excuses.14

Bejan
783
Astell presents an similar problem for political theorists, for whom she
has served as an “antiliberal” feminist avatar in critiques of John Locke
since Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract (1988).15 Even if one likes her
account of natural equality and the critique of the social contract that fol-
lows from it, it seems one must mislike Astell’s own social and political
conclusions. This perhaps explains why, despite Patricia Springborg’s
enthusiastic efforts in the 1990s, Astell’s uptake among theorists has been
minimal, while historians of political thought continue to treat her as a
conventional (if singular) Tory hack of the Augustan Age rather than as a
serious political thinker in her own right.16 Scholarly focus has thus
remained primarily on Astell’s “feminist” tracts—A Serious Proposal to
the Ladies: Parts I & II
(1694, 1696), Some Reflections on Marriage
(1700), and its 1706 Preface—along with her theological works, Letters
Concerning the Love of God
(1695) and The Christian Religion, As
Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England
(1705),17 while her
political pamphlets—Moderation Truly Stat’d, A Fair Way with Dissenters,
An Impartial Inquiry Into the Causes of the Late Rebellion
(all 1704), and
Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry into Wit (1709)—have received compara-
tively little attention. Indeed, Moderation and Bart’lemy Fair were
excluded from Springborg’s Cambridge edition of Astell’s Political
Writings
and remain unavailable in modern editions.
This article argues that none of the scholarly strategies on offer has fully
done justice to the radical ambition of Astell’s thought, while some have
risked perpetuating a negative stereotype of the female intellectual as funda-
mentally fragmented and, well, a bit mad.18 And so where others have sought
to resolve Astell’s paradox by appealing to her context, in what follows I
pursue a more fundamental resolution at the level of her concepts.19 I begin
by asking what Astell meant when she described human beings as “equal”
before considering why she saw no tension between this natural equality and
the hierarchical arrangements she defended in society, church, and state.
Reading these concepts carefully across her works demonstrates that equality
and hierarchy were not only not opposites for Astell but mutually depen-
dent—a conceptual relationship captured in the image of a “scale” (as in a
ladder or staircase) as a graduated hierarchy of ordered ranks, within the
rungs of which particular individuals with differential dignity might nonethe-
less be acknowledged as “equals.”
This idea of the order of Creation as a scale of perfection will be familiar to
modern readers as the “Great Chain of Being,” the jettisoning of which has
become synonymous with philosophical modernity.20 Yet this legacy of
Christian Platonism suggests that any paradox in Astell’s thought is largely the
product of a modernist conceit that treats equality and hierarchy as antonyms

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Political Theory 47(6)
while assuming the former must be prior, normative, and presumptively
hostile to the latter. For Astell, however, it was the opposite. As an “in-
rank” relation, equality just was hierarchical; equal status had to be bounded
and ordered as a matter of conceptual, practical, and rational necessity,
while “equals” could and would nevertheless differ in their degrees of dig-
nity. Strictly equal treatment was thus in need of justification for Astell, not
the other way around.
Attending to Astell’s own understanding should remind us that natural
equality was, in fact, a commonplace for centuries, with deep roots in
Christian and Roman law traditions, before some early modern thinkers—
including philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, or revolutionaries like John
Milton and the Leveller John Lilburne—began to argue that it should have
consequences in the social and political realm.21 In denying these conse-
quences, Astell was in many ways typical—not simply of Tories but of most
of her contemporaries.
And yet it is only with Astell’s hierarchical conception of equality
clearly in view that one can appreciate two of the most original features of
her thought: what I call her ethics of ascent, on the one hand, and her psy-
chology of superiority
, on the other. These themes unite the seemingly
disparate elements of her output by explaining the centrality of a third
concept, ambition, in her thought, as well as her skeptical sensitivity to the
political language of equality itself as a masculine effort to convert mere
differences of degree into distinctions of rank and so render women, as
such, inferior. Finally, Astell’s ethics and psychology also shed light on her
curious embrace of Niccolò Machiavelli in what remains her most
neglected work of political theory, “A Prefatory Discourse on Dr
...

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