Vindiciae Gallicae was James Mackintosh's first
major publication, a contribution to the debate begun by Edmund
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (published
by Liberty Fund in 1999). The success of Mackintosh's defense of the
French Revolution propelled him into the heart of London Whig
circles. The turn of events in France following the September 1792
Massacres caused Mackintosh, along with other moderate Whigs, to
revise his opinions and to move closer to Burke's position.
A Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations was the
introduction to a popular course of public lectures at Lincoln's Inn
in 1799 and 1800. These lectures provided Mackintosh with an
opportunity to complete the evolution of his political thought by
expounding the principles of a Scottish version of the science of
natural jurisprudence dealing with “the rights and duties of men and
of states,” to announce his withdrawal of support for the French
Revolution, and to criticize former allies on the radical wing of
the reform movement.
The Liberty Fund edition also includes
Mackintosh's Letter to William Pitt, an attack on the prime
minister, Pitt the Younger, for going back on his own record as a
parliamentary reformer; and On the State of France in 1815,
his reflections on the nature and causes of the French
Revolution.
James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was a prominent
Scottish Whig politician, a moral philosopher, and a historian of
England. He belonged to the group of students that surrounded Dugald
Stewart, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, during the last
decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the
nineteenth century. He was a regular writer for the publishing
enterprises this group founded and edited, notably the Edinburgh
Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he
contributed to the latter his “Dissertation on the Progress of
Ethical Philosophy, Chiefly During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries,” thereby completing a project begun by Dugald
Stewart.
Donald Winch is Research Professor in the School of
Humanities at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British
Academy.
Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual
History and Director of the Centre for Intellectual History at the
University of Sussex, England.
