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WOLLSTONECRAFT'S VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (1792) identifies dissimulation as a specifically female problem. Attacking modesty as the embodiment of insincerity, Wollstonecraft aligns femininity with deceptiveness and suggests that as a consequence, women have an obligation to be not less but more truthful than their male counterparts: this is the ultimate "revolution in female manners" for which she calls.1 Her call emerges from a historical moment characterized not just by its perception of a crisis in the manners and situation of women, however, but by what was widely understood to be a crisis of sincerity in the nation at large. The breakdown of honest and open communication between men and women is linked by Wollstonecraft to other failures-of political representation, of individual rights-and Wollstonecraft's call for women to become more sincere is also part of a larger political plan. Godwin is even more explicit than Wollstonecraft about the political evils of insincerity. While Wollstonecraft attacks politeness primarily insofar as it is a tool for the oppression of women, Godwin argues that insincerity is the most stubborn obstacle to social reform and political revolution in the broadest sense.
Godwin's philosophical argument against insincerity in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) may be neither so persuasive nor so practical as Wollstonecraft's gendered and openly polemical attack on politeness. Yet Political Justice has the virtue of taking sincerity to its logical extreme, setting up the premise that only the complete lack of reserve between individuals will guarantee absolute freedom in the political sphere. By exploring the rhetorical and cultural contexts in which Godwin's argument for truthtelling is situated, I hope to show how and why the problem of insincerity had come to be perceived by writers of the 1790s as central to questions of power and exclusion. Godwin's arguments for sincerity in Political justice can be read profitably in counterpoint with a body of writing, more sympathetic to politeness, authored by Hume, the Edgeworths and others. Godwin responds quite explicitly to several of these arguments; others are written in the wake of Godwin's own defense of absolute sincerity, and with the goal of undermining such a defense and preserving thereby the social and political stability that politeness secures.
The impossibility of thinking about politeness without also considering...