Catharine Macaulay and the Reception of Hobbes in the Eighteenth Century

In Marcus P. Adams (ed.), A Companion to Hobbes. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley. pp. 492–504 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

There is a disconnect between the central place that Hobbes now occupies in the presumed history of democratic republicanism, and the fortunes of his political philosophy during the period leading up to the American and French revolutions. Given the central place that Hobbes’s political ideas are now accorded in the history of liberal democracy, this is a surprising fact. One of the few eighteenth-century works to engage with Hobbes was Catharine Macaulay’s critical, Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr Hobbes’s “Philosophical rudiments of government and society, first published in 1767. This chapter locates Macaulay’s polemic in the context of critiques and editions of Hobbes’s political philosophy, published earlier in the century, in particular the English edition of his works and the translation of Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae disquisition philosophica, which both appeared in 1750. It compares Macaulay’s critique with Cumberland’s and suggests that there are features of Macaulay’s treatment of Hobbes’s ideas which help explain how it has been possible for them to have come to occupy the central place they now enjoy in the history of democratic thought, as it is now taught, despite the fact that his philosophy was almost universally rejected by democratic republicans during the eighteenth century and thus had little to do with the actual genesis of Western democratic institutions.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay.Karen Green (ed.) - 2019 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Catharine Macaulay and the concept of “radical enlightenment”.Karen Green - 2021 - Intellectual History Review 31 (1):165-180.
Catharine Macaulay's influence on Mary Wollstonecraft.Alan M. S. J. Coffee - 2019 - In Sandrine Berges, Eileen Hunt Botting & Alan M. S. J. Coffee (eds.), The Wollstonecraftian Mind. London: pp. 198-210.
Restoring Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Republicanism?Karen Green - 2021 - Dialogue and Universalism 31 (3):39–57.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-01-13

Downloads
14 (#846,545)

6 months
10 (#135,615)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Karen Green
University of Melbourne

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references