Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Self-government sounds like the most basic credential in the modern moral résumé, but Astell needles the premise: even the people who swear theyre only minding their own business rarely believe theyre actually qualified to do that. The line is written in the dry, poised cadence of early modern moral philosophy, yet it smuggles a sharp political point. If we are so pleased with our own conduct that we assume we can rule ourselves, why not rule others? And if we doubt our fitness even for that private task, what does it say about the easy confidence of those who claim a natural right to command?

Astell is writing at a moment when authority - in church, in marriage, in monarchy - is defended as tradition plus "nature". Her feminist intervention (most famously in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies) takes the reigning logic and turns it against itself. The subtext is that mens self-assured governance, often used to justify womens subordination, is less a fact than a flattering story. By pairing "Men or Women", she refuses the usual carve-out that treats women as uniquely irrational or morally weak; vanity and self-exculpation are human, not feminine.

The intent is not humility for its own sake. Its a critique of unearned authority dressed as a compliment to common sense. Astell exposes how power depends on confidence masquerading as competence, and how that confidence is socially distributed - granted to men, denied to women - even when the inner evidence (our messy motives, our self-serving narratives) is basically the same.