Catharine Macaulay and the concept of “radical enlightenment”

ABSTRACT

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel have offered somewhat differing accounts of what they call the “Radical Enlightenment”; the elements of enlightenment thought which resulted in the radical political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the rise of democratic republicanism. Jonathan Israel, in particular, insists that the radical enlightenment was radical both in its secular rejection of all providentialist and teleological metaphysics, as well as radical in its democratic tendencies. This paper looks at the way in which Catharine Macaulay’s very influential defense of the equal rights of men, during the lead up to the American and French revolutions, poses problems for Israel’s account of the radical enlightenment and it argues that the religious foundation of her political radicalism was characteristic of many of her contemporaries, thus fitting in better with Jacob’s more ecumenical account of the radical enlightenment than with Israel’s more purely secular characterization.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical enlightenment
• republicanism
• equal rights
• democratic revolution
• providentialism

Notes on contributor

Karen Green holds a Professorial Fellowship (honorary) at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 with Jacqueline Broad (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She recently edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her most recent book is Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (Routledge, 2020).

Notes

1 Copeland, Woods, and McDowell, Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 2.150; Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 11.169–70.

2 Walpole, Memoirs, 4.68.

3 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1.448; [Ruffhead] “Review,” 304.

4 Harcourt, The Harcourt Papers, 8.110; Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 95, 100–1, 105, 129.

5 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment.

6 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 110; Jacob, “The Radical Enlightenment,” 54.

7 Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Israel, A Revolution of the Mind.

8 Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 20.

9 Green, Women’s Political Thought, 6–10; Green, “Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Faith.”

10 Jacob, “The Radical Enlightenment,” 50–2.

11 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 25; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 21.

12 Macaulay, History of England.

13 A Catalogue of Tracts, 24, 42; Hill and Hill, “Catharine Macaulay’s History.”

14 Macaulay, Immutability of Moral Truth, 78.

15 Stuurman, “Pathways,” 233–4.

16 Jacob, “The Radical Enlightenment,” 54; Withey, “Catharine Macaulay.”

17 Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’,” 23.

18 Ibid., 24.

19 Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 290.

20 Israel, The Expanding Blaze, 6, 291, 306.

21 Hutton, “Virtue, God, and Stoicism,” 142. See also Hutton, “Liberty, Equality, and God.”

22 Israel, The Expanding Blaze, 100, 285.

23 Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’,” 27; Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts.

24 Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’,” 29.

25 Green, “Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Faith.”

26 Earbery, Bishop of Bangor’s Answer, 47.

27 Macaulay, History of England, 3.77–8, note.

28 S … , “To the Author.”

29 Jackson, Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, 8.

30 Ibid., 4.

31 Ibid., 7; Young, “Jackson, John (1686–1763).”

32 Macaulay, History of England, 2.253–4.

33 Ibid., 3.165, 3.223, 3.263 note, 4.355, 4.431, 5.10 note, 5.178.

34 Macaulay, Loose Remarks; Macaulay, History of England, 5.79–80.

35 Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 35.

36 Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’,” 25; Colbourn, “Jefferson’s Use of the Past.”

37 Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2.1007–8.

38 Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 40, 207–8; Israel “‘Radical Enlightenment’,” 30. Quoting, Papas, Renegade Revolutionary, 21, 91–2, 102.

39 Lee, The Lee Papers, 1.78, 1.92.

40 Pocock, “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian”; Staves, “Liberty of a She-Subject.”

41 Green, “Liberty and Virtue”; Green, “Locke, Enlightenment, and Liberty”; Green, “Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Faith”; Broad, “Merger of Wills”; Green, “The Rights of Woman”.

42 Macaulay, History of England, 3.344–7, note.

43 Ibid., 5.19–20.

44 Pizan, L’advision Cristine, III.26, 137.

45 Macaulay, Immutability of Moral Truth, 78.

46 O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism.

47 Macaulay, Immutability of Moral Truth, 17; Locke, Essay, 549 (IV.3.18).

48 Cockburn, Works, 1.45–111; Green, “On some footnotes.”

49 Watson, Remarks on John Locke; Walmsley, Craig, and Burrows, “Authorship of Remarks.”

50 Macaulay, Immutability of Moral Truth, 30–2.

51 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, iii.1.

52 “Bentham,” in Mill, Collected Works, 10.78–9.

53 Green, “Macaulay as Critic of Hume.”

54 Mackie, Ethics.

55 Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic; Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica.

56 Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”

57 Field, Science Without Numbers.

58 Kant, Foundations.

59 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 13–43.

60 Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 23.

61 Whyte, “Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche.”

62 Macaulay, Letters on Education, 321.

63 Ibid., 324.

64 Ibid., 328.

65 Green, “Locke, Enlightenment, and Liberty.”

66 Jacob, “The Radical Enlightenment.”

67 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain.”

68 Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason; Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience.

69 Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition.

70 Mirabeau to Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, 1786, Archives nationales, Fonds Brissot, 446AP/7, Dossier 1.