Until the 1970s, the Rights of Men was typically considered disorganized, incoherent, illogical, and replete with ad hominem attacks (such as the suggestion that Burke would have promoted the crucifixion of Christ if he were a Jew).[24] It had been touted as an example of "feminine" emotion tilting at "masculine" reason.[25] However, since the 1970s scholars have challenged this view, arguing that Wollstonecraft employed 18th-century modes of writing, such as the digression, to great rhetorical effect. More importantly, as scholar Mitzi Myers argues, "Wollstonecraft is virtually alone among those who answered Burke in eschewing a narrowly political approach for a wide-ranging critique of the foundation of the Reflections."[26] Wollstonecraft makes a primarily moral argument; her "polemic is not a confutation of Burke's political theories, but an exposure of the cruel inequities which those theories presuppose."[27] Wollstonecraft's style was also a deliberate choice, enabling her to respond to Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as well as to Reflections.[28]
The style of the Rights of Men mirrors much of Burke's own text. It has no clear structure; like Reflections, the text follows the mental associations made by the author as she was writing.[29] Wollstonecraft's political treatise is written, like Burke's, in the form of a letter: his to C. J. F. DePont, a young Frenchman, and hers to Burke himself.[30] Using the same form, metaphors, and style as Burke, she turns his own argument back on him. The Rights of Men is as much about language and argumentation as it is about political theory; in fact, Wollstonecraft claims that these are inseparable.[31] She advocates, as one scholar writes, "simplicity and honesty of expression, and argument employing reason rather than eloquence."[30] At the beginning of the pamphlet, she appeals to Burke: "Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together."[32]
The Rights of Men does not aim to present a fully articulated alternative political theory to Burke's, but instead to demonstrate the weaknesses and contradictions in his own argument. Therefore, much of the text is focused on Burke's logical inconsistencies, such as his support of the American revolution and the Regency Bill (which proposed restricting monarchical power during George III's madness in 1788), in contrast to his lack of support for the French revolutionaries.[33] In criticism of Burke's contradictory support of the Regency Bill along with supporting the rule of monarchy in France, she writes:
You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined, whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had hurled him from his throne, and that it was the most insulting mockery to recollect that he had been a king, or treat him with any particular respect on account of his former dignity…. I have, Sir, been reading, with a scrutinizing, comparative eye, several of your insensible and profane speeches during the King's illness. I disdain to take advantage of a man's weak side, or draw consequences from an unguarded transport—A lion preys not on carcasses![34] [emphasis Wollstonecraft's]
Wollstonecraft's goal, she writes, is "to shew you [Burke] to yourself, stripped of the gorgeous drapery in which you have enwrapped your tyrannic principles."[35] However, she does also gesture towards a larger argument of her own, focusing on the inequalities faced by British citizens because of the class system.[36] As Wollstonecraft scholar Barbara Taylor writes, "treating Burke as a representative spokesman for old-regime despotism, Wollstonecraft champions the reformist initiatives of the new French government against his 'rusty, baneful opinions', and censures British political elites for their opulence, corruption, and inhumane treatment of the poor."[37]
