Liberty and religion: Catharine Macaulay and the history of republicanism and the Enlightenment

Abstract

ABSTRACT This review article considers new books by Karen Green on Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) alongside Rachel Hammersley's introduction to the longue durée history of republicanism. The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay allows us to understand the historian and political writer in her own terms as opposed to a representative of a supposedly coherent commonwealth or republican tradition, as she has often been viewed since the work of Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock. Green's intellectual biography emphasises the religious nature of Macaulay's understanding of both republicanism and the Enlightenment. These publications can be beneficially read together with Hammersley's new book, which contends that republicanism has been a multifarious and contested concept from antiquity to the present day. The seventeenth-century commonwealth canon was constructed and made coherent by John Toland half a century after the English Revolution, and by Macaulay's friend Thomas Hollis in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As Green's work reminds us, meanwhile, the natural law tradition of John Locke and Christian eudaimonism were as important as John Milton and James Harrington for Macaulay.