Journal of the History of Philosophy

Though she was once one of the most recognizable and celebrated public intellectuals in Britain and was read avidly in both revolutionary America and France, after her death in 1791, Catharine Macaulay's work fell into almost total obscurity for around two hundred years. This began to change in the 1990s, since which time interest in Macaulay from historians, philosophers, and feminist scholars has gathered pace. In the last decade and a half, no one has likely done more to advance this scholarship than Karen Green, who has published numerous journal articles and book chapters probing deeply into Macaulay's thought and intellectual context, and who helpfully edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which had not previously been easily available to readers. As one would expect, Green's Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment builds on this depth of research. For a relatively slim volume, this is the most complete and detailed intellectual biography of Macaulay that I know of, an impressive feat given Macaulay's voluminous output.

The aims of the book are twofold: first, to provide a narrative biography following Macaulay's life and the development of her works as they unfolded across her life, and second, to offer an overview and exposition of her ideas in their social and political context (4). These aims are important to bear in mind, since they establish what the book [End Page 158] is able to do and what it stops short of giving us. The volume is organized chronologically, divided into seven main chapters, each representing a short period in Macaulay's life, with an introduction and concluding chapter that considers her legacy, bringing the total chapters to nine. In each of the substantive chapters, Green mixes a biographical account of Macaulay's life with an often detailed analysis of one or more of her main works written during that period, as well as an assessment of how these works both engaged with, and were received within, some of the political and intellectual debates at the time. This is expertly done, with Green drawing on her intimate acquaintance with Macaulay's correspondence with many of the key figures of the period. The book, therefore, would make an excellent companion to anyone reading through the Correspondence as well as for those studying any of Macaulay's historical volumes, treatises, and tracts.

An especially strong aspect of Green's book is the way she weaves an ongoing dialogue between Macaulay and several influential figures from her intellectual world across the chapters. One of these is David Hume, who, like Macaulay, had written an ideologically situated—even if both authors claimed impartiality—multivolume History of England. Though Hume's series was completed before Macaulay's had begun, hers can be seen as a philosophical and political rival to his. While the two would only correspond directly once on the subject, Green compares the impact that their respective philosophies have on their resulting political positions. In the 1760s, Green argues, Hume's naturalism, empiricism, and skepticism gave rise to a social conservative politics, whereas Macaulay's theological rationalism provided the basis for her optimistic and radical politics (50). By the 1790s, however, when Macaulay was writing her Letters on Education, Green detects some elements of a Humean philosophy of mind coming to influence Macaulay, albeit likely through David Hartley, particularly concerning the importance of sympathy on our moral psychology, even if there remain important differences between them (180–82). Green also analyzes Macaulay's engagement with Thomas Hobbes in her Loose Remarks and her two formal Observations on writings by Edmund Burke. Of particular value to historians of republicanism is Green's tracing and examination of Macaulay's ongoing intellectual relationship with key political figures, such as John Wilkes in Britain; Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, John and Abigail Adams, James Otis, Mercy Otis Warren, and George Washington in America; Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville in France, among many others. Though Macaulay's reputation as an influential political writer in all three countries has since come to be eclipsed in the popular imagination by Thomas Paine and to some extent by Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, Green rightly and helpfully corrects this picture with a wealth of detail showing how extensively her ideas were received, disseminated, discussed, acted upon, and opposed.

Though Green does identify several principles and values that are central to Macaulay's moral and political philosophy—such as the natural and moral equality of all human beings, and a commitment to individual and civic virtue—what she does not do in the book is bring these together, to show how each principle is internally related to the others, forming a distinctive methodological framework through which Macaulay addresses the questions of collective self-government. Instead, Green analyses Macaulay as building upon the principles of natural religion and applying a "relatively simple logic" (230). In particular, Green focuses on an ideal that she terms "Christian eudaimonism," which combines Aristotelianism with an understanding of the self as participating in God's transcendent goodness (213–14). Though Green has developed this notion elsewhere, she does not defend it explicitly in this book. While I am not convinced of the Aristotelian or eudaimonistic basis in Macaulay's thought, that Macaulay grounds her philosophy in an optimistic, rational form of natural law that motivates individuals to behave virtuously and for the common good is not in dispute.

However, by focusing on this substantive eudaimonistic principle, Green misses something of the elegance and subtlety of the system that Macaulay builds. Were we to strip Macaulay's philosophy of its archaic theological groundings, for example, Green argues that much of her principled disagreement with Hume would dissolve, leaving only rival empirical hypotheses about the best way for reasoning social creatures to live [End Page 159] together. This overlooks the growing importance that Macaulay's political framework, suitably recast in contemporary secular terms, has in republican discourse today. Green says little in the book about modern republicanism, other than to distance her reading of Macaulay from the current republican ideal of "non-domination" (223–24). What this omission obscures, however, is the increasing awareness by present-day republicans that women contributed in significant numbers to the history of this tradition, challenging many of the male-dominated assumptions that have beset it (see Alan Coffee, "Women and Republicanism," Australasian Philosophical Review 3/4 [2020]: 361–69). Particularly through her influence on Wollstonecraft, but also on her own account, Macaulay is at the forefront of this reappraisal. This is, in my view, a missed opportunity. In her conclusion, for example, Green includes a subsection on "Macaulay on the Tradition of Liberal Feminism," but she is silent on republican feminism. One final observation about Green's focus on the particular substantive principles in Macaulay, rather than on her framework, is that it also sometimes leads Green to take a narrower view than she might of some of the principles she identifies. On the question of liberty, Green twice says that Macaulay "clearly" uses a positive notion as understood through Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction (220–21). However, while it cannot be denied that in some sense Macaulay does invoke a positive notion, Berlin's sharp dichotomy is not helpful when thinking in terms of a framework of ideas in which Macaulay makes use of both positive and negative elements within her broader system.

These methodological differences aside, Green has produced a magnificent intellectual biography that will be indispensable for scholars interested in Macaulay specifically or in late eighteenth-century politics in general. As Bridget Hill ushered in a new era of Macaulay studies a generation ago with The Republican Virago (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Green too has likely produced the definitive guide for the generation to come.