Politics & Power Quote by Mary Astell

Rhetoric gets a bad rap as the art of dressing up a lie, but Mary Astell flips it into something closer to intellectual self-defense. Her intent is almost clinical: persuasion isn’t about winning; it’s about clearing the debris that blocks judgment. The sentence moves like a staircase - prejudices first, then passions, then perception, then action - mapping an ideal progression from mental fog to ethical attention.

The subtext is sharper than the calm syntax suggests. Astell is writing in a culture that routinely coded women as irrational, overly emotional, and therefore unfit for serious public thought. So when she talks about “passions” submitting to “Reasons,” she’s not just sketching a general theory of argument. She’s staking a claim: if reason can govern passion, then the people dismissed as “passionate” can be educated into authority. Her rhetoric is a quiet counterattack against a social order that used “prejudice” as policy.

Context matters: late 17th- and early 18th-century England is thick with religious polemic, partisan pamphlets, and public debate that often confuses volume for proof. Astell’s formulation reads like a corrective to that noisy marketplace. “Place our Subject in a Right Light” is doing covert work, implying that many disputes aren’t about facts so much as framing - who gets to illuminate the topic, and who benefits from keeping it dim.

The line’s power is its moral ambition: rhetoric as a tool for truth, but also as a discipline of the self, asking audiences to earn their opinions by actually considering them.