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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.

"New Constitution of France.

…The principle of theory which has actuated the Legislators of France has been, that the object of all legitimate Government is the assertion and protection of the NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN. They cannot indeed be absolved of some deviations from the path prescribed by this great principle; few indeed compared with those of any other body of whom history has preserved any record; but too many for their own glory, and for the happiness of the human race. This principle, however, is the basis of their edifice, and if it be false, the structure must fall to the ground. Against this principle, therefore, Mr. Burke has, with great judgment, directed his attack. Appeals to natural right are, according to him, inconsistent and preposterous. A complete abdication and surrender of all natural right is made by man in entering into<208> Society, and the only rights which he retains are CREATED by the compact which holds together the society of which he is member. This doctrine he thus explicitly asserts.—“The moment,” says he, “you abate any thing from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation on those rights, from that moment the whole organization of society becomes a consideration of convenience.” Burke, p. 152. “How can any man claim under the conventions of civil society rights which do not so much as suppose its existence—Rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?” Ibid. p. 151. To the same purpose is his whole reasoning from p. 149 to p. 155. To examine this doctrine, therefore, is of fundamental importance. To this effect it is not necessary to enter on any elaborate research into the metaphysical principles of politics and ethics. A full discussion of the subject would<209> indeed demand such an investigation. The origin of natural rights must have been illustrated, and even their existence proved against some theorists. But such an enquiry would have been inconsistent with the nature of a publication, of which the object was to enforce conviction on the people. We are besides absolved from the necessity of it in a controversy with Mr. Burke, who himself recognizes, in the most ample form, the existence of those natural rights."

James Mackintosh

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.