A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes - Thomas Taylor (1792)
2,606
Published 2023-06-09
"A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes is an exercise in irony, a witty, merry book in which Taylor, using the weapon of laughter, professed agreement with the radical ideas recently published by two of his friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, and by carrying these to their logical extremes, reduced them to absurdity. That it was their ideas which eventually triumphed does not lessen the reader's enjoyment of his wit, or alter the usefulness of his parody of what he regarded as an oversimplification of the nature of man, an over-generalization of the worth of all men, and an egalitarianism he could not accept..."
"Indirectly Taylor's mock-serious defence of the rights of brutes stemmed from the publication in November 1790, little more than a year after the storming of the Bastille, of Edmund Burke's unsympathetic Reflections on the French Revolution. This book led to an immediate reply from Mary Wollstonecraft; two editions of her open letter to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, were published in November 1790, followed in 1792 by her more famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Of the great spate of refutations of Burke's Reflections the most powerful, famous, and effective was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, written in 1790, published in London in 1791, and swiftly banned; to own or to sell a copy was a criminal offence, but four months later Paine wrote to his friend George Washington that already eleven thousand of the sixteen thousand copies printed had been sold. Paine, very helpful in the American Revolution, was now active in the French Revolution, with a seat at the Convention. He had left England for Paris before this first part of the Rights of Man was published; he returned, but in 1792 when the second part was published he fled to France to avoid the trial for seditious libel it provoked. The magic phrase, "the rights of man," used decorously in America, was in France highly inflammatory, as indeed it tends to be today when on all sides, in many parts of the modern world, there are repetitive cries of the right to strike, to vote, to assemble, to march, to demonstrate."
"Mary Wollstonecraft as a guest in Taylor's home had called his study "the abode of peace." He was not in sympathy with her radical ideas or those of Paine; he was not an advocate of an egalitarian world, but if they insisted upon agitation for this, he could show them how much farther they must carry their theories. His Vindication of the Rights of Brutes endeavors to demonstrate that who has said A must say B; and that B leads on to an unforeseen Z."
"Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men was not concerned wholly with political rights or the injustices suffered by the poor. She was angered by Burke's tendency to "vitiate reason" which she postulated as man's highest quality, leading him to virtue, and so distinguishing him from the animals, who have not the gift of reason. This is the sounding board for Taylor, who sets out to prove that animals have reason; he supports his thesis with multiple quotation from the Greek philosophers, thereby making his point without direct statement that men are not equally blessed with reason. He believed that "in every class of beings in the universe... there is a first, a middle, and a last, in order that the progression of things may form one unbroken chain, originating in deity, and terminating in matter... a golden chain of beings" formed by the first and smallest class, the multitude forming the lowest. He set out therefore to show the impracticability of an egalitarian society."
"The worship of animals, and the statues of gods with animal heads or bodies Taylor offered as an indication of the high estimation in which men have held the brute creation whose rights he was now demanding. Lacking time to pursue the matter further, he left to others the task of vindicating the rights of rocks and stones and trees, and the very dust beneath men's feet..."
Full text freely available here: books.google.ca/books?id=A-hhAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1#v=one…
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All Comments (19)
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Please like, share, and read the description for some additional context on this work.
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One of my favorite Taylor pieces. Thanks for reading!
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Thanks for this wonderful reading. I was unfamiliar with this text, and a few minutes in I thought "okay, this has to be parodic". Of course it is! And laugh-out-loud funny in places (the elephant stuff in particular). Tres amusant!
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Thank you so much for posting this. I think this is one of the most important writings that should be taught to school children. Such an important perspective for the modern world, the true logical end of prejudice.
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Wonderful! Thanks for all your hard work. So much material I've never been exposed to. May the algogods make your channel grow!
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I would have thought Plotinus might have led us in different directions than satirizing equality between species...the rationality of laughter, the contemplative action of nature, etc. Doesn't Willemien Otten do something along those lines?
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I've always wanted to understand the birds, who knew I could....all things being equal and all 🤗
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Unironically this.
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If you read “The Dawn of Everything” by D. Wengrow and D. Graeber, you will understand where these ideas of freedom and equality came from. The enlightenment of the western mind started in the now named americas.
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Ta Dan wonderful x
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Heck ya dan
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dude... when u started reading the descriptions of animals i couldnt help thinking about bojack horseman lol esp the part where dogs are actors
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I would love to watch your debate or comment on James Lindsay's lectures eg. The Gnostic parasite, where he repeatedly criticize Hermeticism as well as other mystics and perennialists and comperes them directly to marxism, woke culture and postmodernism. Thank you for your hard work and for what I've learnt from you
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I haven't read the works of Wollstonecraft and Paine; could someone briefly explain what makes their ideas so absurd?
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Oddly relevant to my current surroundings.
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I love how Taylor wrote this simply to show the absurdity of Wollstonecraft and Paine's ideas. It's too bad that political irony like this isn't practiced more in modern times.
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Are you vegetarian?
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i hope that you are okay during the fires, Dan 🩵💙 with the smoke:::
