Catharine Macaulay as critic of Hume; history, morality, liberty, and enlightenment

Assoc Prof Karen Green (University of Melbourne)

Catharine Macaulay’s The History of England challenges Hume’s interpretation of the history of the Stuarts, as developed in his The History of Great Britain, and is grounded in meta-ethical, religious, and political principles that are also fundamentally opposed to those developed by Hume, as she makes clear in her Treatise on the Immutabilty of Moral Truth. The contrast between them is paradoxical from the point of view of those who see progress in science and religious scepticism as developing in step with the development of radical politics and advocacy for political progress. For, Macaulay’s ‘republican’ history, which was read on both sides of the Atlantic as justifying the overthrow of arbitrary governments, was grounded in ancient conceptions of liberty, virtue, and in sincere theistic belief. By contrast, Hume’s moral and religious scepticism led directly to the political conservatism evident in his history. This paper develops this paradox through an outline of their alternative accounts of the significance of the two English revolutions, and the opposing metaphysical and meta-ethical positions that underpin those accounts.