This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman as integral to her critique of the culture, behaviour, psychology, and ‘manners’ of commercial society. Against a narrative of human motivation deeply rooted in political economic discourse, Wollstonecraft associates property with indolence, libertinism, and immorality, and offers an alternative moral economy which links virtue to effort, labour, and exertion in the linked spheres of mind, manners, and morals. The imagination is revealed as posing a fundamental challenge to political economy, as an independent power which frees the self from the subject relations of property order. In calling for a ‘revolution in manners’ addressed especially to women, Wollstonecraft looks to a moral revolution against the forces of history and calls on women to save commercial society from itself, and to save themselves from it.

Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft’s major writings – including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, and her travel writing – this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

When Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was first published, it was categorised in Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review as a work of political economy. The introduction asks what this term meant for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and argues that it was used to understand the nature and operation of modern commercial society, as well as the potential for its reformation. Wollstonecraft’s relation to this project is explored, both through a survey of her engagement with Adam Smith and through her lived experience as an unmarried, often indebted woman in a society organised around possession of property. Wollstonecraft is presented as a writer engaging throughout her career as a critic of the connected material, economic, moral, psychological, and social conditions of modern commercial contemporaneity, and as anticipating the opposition to political economy of later Romantic writers.

Chapter 7 focuses on Empedocles’ cosmic cycle, exploring whether and how it accommodates his doctrine of rebirth. First, through a new definition of his concept of double zoogony, the chapter opens with a reconsideration of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle as a regular alternation of two phases, Love’s Sphairos/One and Strife’s Cosmos/Many. Second, zooming in on the phase of the Cosmos and through the analysis of the metaphor of conflict in Empedocles’ cosmological narrative, the chapter investigates the origin and place of humans and gods in the world and argues that the spatial and conceptual mortal/immortal antinomy structures the action of Love and Strife in the cycle. Third, returning to the metaphor of conflict, it is argued that cosmic cycles are loaded with ethical import and that human moral agency determines the shape of our world. Finally, by showing that the moral import of the cosmic cycle seems to ground Empedocles’ religious concept of rebirth on the level of physical principles, it is shown that Empedocles’ physics does not merely accommodate, but seems in fact to be motivated by his belief in rebirth.

Chapter 2 considers how Cicero responded to the model of the body politic proposed by Catiline. Rejecting the head of state metaphor, his oratory describes a civic healer capable of diagnosing and curing the ills of the Republic. This idea drew upon a well-established moralizing tradition that identified vice as a contagion that had infected the res publica. Whereas Varro, Sallust, and Lucretius employed such imagery to indict Rome’s governing class for its ambitio and avaritia, Cicero used it to justify the extralegal execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. Although he sought to protect a constitution under threat, his medically inspired language helped legitimize violence as a tool of political engagement. Identifying Clodius and his allies as new malignancies in need of amputation, he contributed to a corrosive cycle of civic conflict that culminated in Pompey’s sole consulship and Caesar’s dictatorship, two constitutional innovations justified as curative remedies. In the end, his rhetoric proved susceptible to appropriation by those less invested in collegial governance than he.

The Conclusion uses the downfall of Nero to consider the legacy of the body politic metaphor in Roman political thought. Julio-Claudian writers relied on the duality of head and body to express fears about the recurrence of civil war. Without a head to command Rome’s warring limbs, they argued, Rome would return to its ancestral cycle of self-destruction. The Year of the Four Emperors confirmed the prescience of their warnings. Plutarch and Tacitus relied on symbolism of a headless body politic to describe the conflict, confirming their perception of sole rule as necessary if not ideal. This contest for power therefore did not weaken the Principate so much as confirm its viability as an institution independent of its Augustan origins. With the rise of the Flavians came the formalization of both sole rule and the Imperial model of the body politic for centuries to come.

B 115 is generally regarded as the reference fragment of Empedocles’ doctrine of rebirth, being the place where he presents himself as a god banished from the divine community as a result of certain crimes, sent into exile on our earth and here condemned to be reborn as all kinds of mortal beings. In Chapter 1 I argue that, contrary to the vast majority of editions of Empedocles’ fragments, B 115 belongs to the incipit of his physical poem. The chapter mostly focuses on the Strasbourg papyrus and the evidence it uncovered that is relevant to the question of the character and content of the physical poem. After questioning the basis on which scholars have placed B 115 within the Purifications, I will show that the Strasbourg papyrus provides strong proof for its allocation within On Nature. The relocation of this central fragment thus sets the stage for a re-evaluation of Empedocles’ physical system in its entirety, by indicating that it consists of mythical and religious themes in synergy with more strictly physical principles.

Chapter 6 explores the interconnection between natural philosophy and liberation from rebirth, arguing first that knowledge of the world is necessary to change one’s being from mortal to divine nature and, second, that purifications play a central role in knowledge acquisition. After a consideration of epistemic reflections at Empedocles’ time and the role of initiation in attaining true knowledge, it is shown that Empedocles explains the change of being into divine nature at the level of the elements. Indeed, in processes of perception and knowledge acquisition, elements coming from external effluvia interact with elements in the body and thereby modify the mind’s mixture. It follows that the revelation of Empedocles’ philosophy can change our mind to the point that it will become a divine mind. The possibility of becoming divine through knowledge of the world goes along with the training one must undergo to be adequately prepared to receive it. This training coincides with processes of purification, and Empedocles explains from a physiological standpoint how these enable the structure of the elements of our mind to be enhanced to the point where it becomes attuned to the divine.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that Empedocles’ concept of rebirth can be reconciled within his physical system. In this regard I first show that, by drawing on the imaginary of metamorphosis tales, Empedocles conceptualizes rebirths as changes of forms that are analogous to those transformations the elements undergo when mixed in mortal bodies. Second, Empedocles’ concept of rebirth entails personal survival upon the death of the body and, indeed, upon several deaths. Third, although claims to personal survival are thought not to fit with Empedocles’ considerations on psychological and mental functions, and for this reason scholars generally do not consider rebirth as a positive, physical doctrine, here I suggest a different explanation. My argument is that the way in which Empedocles conceived of rebirth as a change of forms led him to marginalize the soul; that is, to fail a reflection on the relationship between personal survival and the self, and the role of the soul in it. Yet he had a traditional, Homeric concept of soul that can not only sustain the idea of disembodied existence, as it stands for personal survival upon death; it can also be adapted to the principles of his physics.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

Chapter 4 deals with several concepts, most of them introduced in the proemial fragments, that translate Empedocles’ idea of the divine. In order both to address the disputed question of what can be considered true gods in Empedocles’ physical system and to explore some of the details of his belief in rebirth by defining what the final promise of divine reward entails, I analyze the entities Empedocles explicitly refers to as gods. Several entities are made equally divine, yet each of them is divine for different reasons, although some of them also share common qualities that allow us to delineate a notion of the divine. In this regard, as far as living beings are concerned, we can conclude that for them to be (or become) gods means having a divine status that is modelled on the divine characteristics of Sphairos, the perfect form of the universe and cosmic god. These characteristics are associated with Love as opposed to Strife and include purity, stability (continuity), symmetry and beauty, bliss and perfect knowledge. In this sense, the divine nature of Sphairos represents Empedocles’ paradigm of godhood in the cosmos to which all living beings aspire.

By first providing a summary of the main arguments in each chapter and then highlighting the ways, elaborated in this study, in which Empedocles’ physics is consistent with his religious interests in rebirth and purification, Chapter 8 sets out the main conclusion of this book, namely that rebirth and purification are an integral part of Empedocles’ physical system; indeed, that rebirth seems to be a premise of some of his physical principles and theories. In doing so, in addition to a new textual reconstruction of the proem of the physical poem, this book offers new insights into pivotal concepts and much debated issues of Empedocles’ thought, such as the conceptualization of rebirth and the notions of daimon, soul and personal survival, the purpose and role of physical doctrine for release from rebirth, the reconstruction of the cosmic cycle and the analysis of its moral significance. Finally, it is emphasized that this novel reconstruction of Empedocles’ thought, together with the book’s methodological standard, can provide a key to approaching and re-evaluating the character and aims of the thought of other early thinkers and of fifth-century natural philosophy in general.