Catharine macaulay’s enlightenment faith and radical politics

Abstract

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 ..