Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment faith and radical politics

Although she was celebrated during her lifetime, and has been the subject of a growing number of studies, Catharine Macaulay’s political philosophy continues to be strikingly absent from mainstream political histories of eighteenth-century radical thought.1 Even a recent revisionist account of the political principles which exercised the Americans in the lead up to the declaration of Independence, mentions her not once.2 Yet her History of England from the Accession of James I, which outlined in detail the political debates that inspired the English Civil War was, in America, ‘every day sought after and read with great avidity.’3 On his return to America from England, in 1769, Benjamin Rush assured the author that both she and her history were becoming every day ‘more and more known’ in America.4 The work was a favourite of Thomas Jefferson.5 John Adams had read it ‘with admiration,’ while Mercy Warren, and many others, looked on its author as a patroness of American liberty.6 In this paper I argue that the absence of serious engagement with Macaulay’s works has helped obscure an important strand of enlightenment faith, that was active in the lead up to the American and French Revolutions, and which, I argue, also played a significant role in the history of feminism. This faith was made up of two intertwined strands, which I will call ‘Christian eudaimonism’ and ‘rational altruism’ for short. To do this, I re-examine various contemporary accounts of the origins of republicanism and democratic theory during the eighteenth-century, all of which have excluded serious consideration of Macaulay’s writing. Bringing her works into the mix, both poses difficulties for certain genealogies of the political thought of the period, and tends to favour a once popular view, which emphasized the centrality of Locke. Nevertheless, the Locke whose influence is found in Macaulay’s writing is not the possessive individualist, or rational egoist, that he and other liberals have been represented as being.7 Rather, for Macaulay, Locke is an advocate of the politics of rational altruism. Her interpretation of his political philosophy is derived from a Christian eudaimonist understanding of humanity’s nature and flourishing.