Scholarly Writing #3: Macaulay’s Refutation of Hobbes

Frontispiece: Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive, Paris: 1642, by Thomas Hobbes. *EC65 H6525 642e, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Read the short excerpt after my analysis to learn more about this frontispiece.

Macaulay’s Loose Remarks on Certain Positions

As her first few Histories gained prominence in the literary market, Macaulay began writing political pamphlets that reflected the values of liberty and natural rights central to her historical philosophy. In both her histories and these pamphlets, which addressed the period of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Macaulay challenged the monarchical views of the renowned English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In 1767, she published her first pamphlet, Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society, initially anonymously, and two years later in a second edition under her own name. In it, she argued against Hobbes’ theory of monarchical government and instead promoted a democratic republic as the only form capable of securing “the virtue, liberty, and happiness of society.” [1]

The pamphlet is divided into two separate parts, the first of which sought to refute key positions in Thomas Hobbes’ social and political thought, with the second providing a brief sketch of Macaulay’s preferred form of government, what she dubbed a ‘democratical government.’ While the two parts are distinct, they are united by her defense of democracy. In fact, her positive use of the term ‘democracy’ in describing her preferred government was unusual for the period and represents an important conceptual innovation on her behalf. [2]

Macaulay’s attention in the first part of her pamphlet is fixed on the English translation of Hobbes’ De Cive (1642/1647), published as Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society in 1651. In the text, Hobbes argues against the natural sociability of human beings in favor of an absolute, monarchical government. Indeed, Hobbes is best known for developing what is now called social contract theory, a method of justifying political principles by imagining the agreements that rational, free, and equal individuals would make in a hypothetical state of nature. According to Hobbes, without a strong central authority, human life would be chaotic and violent. To escape this condition, people would collectively agree to surrender their individual freedoms to a sovereign with absolute power, who could enforce peace and prevent conflict. [3] Macaulay refutes Hobbes’ argument in two main ways. First, she contended that because Hobbes argued all humans were born with an aptitude for reason, he should have accepted humans were born for society itself, as reason would lead us to it. [4] Second, politically, she argued that legislative and executive power could be separated, and that a social contract was formed between the people and a sovereign, not among individuals in the state of nature. Thus, if sovereigns transgressed the terms of the contract, they must be resisted. 

Macaulay’s critiques of Hobbes stem from her belief in liberty and rejection of monarchical forms of government. Macaulay begins her pamphlet with authoritative language, calling Hobbes’ reasoning “mere quibbling” as “it is evident from this jumble, that Mr. Hobbes, either wilfully or ignorantly, here confounds absolute with limited power.” [5] As in her debate with Hume in her History, in refuting Hobbes, Macaulay accepts there must be an ethical perspective from which law can be criticized. She refutes Hobbes’ arguments in favor of monarchy, suggesting that monarchs do not have the administration with virtues or abilities to run a government. [6] Not only that, but Hobbes’ arguments for it are ridiculous, if not blasphemous. She takes particular offense at Hobbes’s claim that monarchy is preeminent, arguing that it fails to cohere with the legitimacy of God’s government of a world in which people would otherwise be ruled by someone with no share in their creation. [7] Macaulay finds Hobbes’s defense of monarchy ineffectual, particularly his claim that injustices committed by historical monarchs stemmed from the faults of individuals rather than from the institution itself.

These philosophical disagreements were not merely theoretical; they undergirded her alternative model of political obligation. Macaulay fundamentally disagreed with Hobbes’ conception of contracts. She envisions a social contract between the people and a ruler or assembly, in which power is limited and revocable if the ruler fails to uphold the agreement (people transfer a limited power for the sake of the common good, and retain the right to declare the contract null, if the other party fails to keep up their end of the bargain). [8] Hobbes, by contrast, allows sovereigns to dissolve contracts at will. Macaulay insists that just contracts require reciprocal obligations. In her fourth volume of History, Macaulay illustrates this contractual principle in the execution of Charles I: government is “the ordinance of man… instituted for the protection of the people, for the end of securing, not overthrowing the rights of nature; that it is a trust either formally admitted or supposed; and that the magistracy is consequently accountable; will meet with little contradiction in a country enlightened with the unobstructed ray of rational learning.” [9] Here, it was the right of the government, or the people, to end the contract with a king who failed to fulfill his duties. [10]

Macaulay makes particular references to ancient and biblical history to pinpoint all of Hobbes’ missteps. Whereas Hobbes contends ancients preferred the monarchical state, Macaulay argues that the “Greeks, from whom alone we can learn ancient prudence … disdained this government, and called all pretenders to its tyrants and usurpers.” [11] Nor does she limit her critique to Greek examples. When Hobbes argues that the “acts of a Nero are not essential to monarchy,” she responds that there was no “advantage he can draw from this argument; for tho’ the execrable villainies that Nero committed was not essential to the nature of his power.” [12] Hobbes’ argument that the paternal government instituted by God was monarchical is also contradicted by examples in history, including the story of Adam, in which the “power Adam had over his children is not mentioned as of the monarchical kind. We find him no where exercising this power or claiming it as his due.” [13] Nevertheless, Macaulay concludes writing in the subjunctive that may Hobbes be ranked “among the foremost of mortals, with Timoleon, Lycurgus, Solon, and Brutus, is the sincere wish of your great admirer and very humble servant.” [14]

Macaulay’s deployment of ancient and biblical history is not merely illustrative; it reflects her broader historiographical method. Unlike many eighteenth-century political theorists who invoked antiquity in the service of mixed-government constitutionalism, Macaulay uses classical and scriptural precedent to undermine hereditary authority altogether. Her appeal to Greek republicanism, Roman tyranny, and biblical patriarchs is therefore a strategic attempt to show that monarchy lacks not only rational justification but historical legitimacy. By reframing antiquity as a record of popular virtue rather than aristocratic wisdom, she advances a distinctly egalitarian reading of the classical past.

So while Macaulay’s first sketch refuted Hobbes’ arguments for monarchy, the second developed a vision of what a legitimate government ought to be. In turning to the question of constitutional design, she was not merely offering an alternative political blueprint but advancing the deeper philosophical claim, implicit throughout her work, that political authority derives from the rational capacity of the people and must be structured to preserve their agency. In sketching a constitution for Corsica, the island then engaged in a struggle for independence from Genoa and France, Macaulay signaled her enthusiasm for a republican government, one that contrasted sharply with the admiration many English radicals expressed for the supposed balance of the English mixed constitution. Her address to Pasquale Paoli (1725–1807), a military and political leader of the Corsican opposition, enabled her to participate in the broader British enthusiasm for the Corsican cause (Paoli went into exile in Britain in the 1760s), while also providing a concrete stage on which to articulate her abstract principles. [15]

The choice of Corsica as a constitutional laboratory was itself significant. By turning to a polity unburdened by entrenched aristocratic institutions, Macaulay could illustrate the kind of republican government that Britain could not yet realize. Corsica thus functions as a counterfactual space in which the structural obstacles of the English constitution, hereditary privilege, corruption, and executive overreach, are removed, allowing her to present a republican model grounded in civic equality. In this sense, the Corsican sketch served both as political intervention and as theoretical demonstration.

Macaulay explicitly favored a democratic republic, one that integrated distinct interests and political orders while preserving the common good. As Horace Walpole observed, the second part of her pamphlet amounted to “printed advice for settling a republic.” [16] The purpose of her “Democratical Form of Government” was to “make all interests unite in the welfare of the state,” as she wrote to Rush in correspondence published with the second edition of Loose Remarks in 1769. To this end, she proposed a bicameral system in which the Senate consisted of members who had previously served in a lower house. The Senate would hold no coercive power but would perform an advisory role, “like the fathers of adults,” as she described it to Rush. [17] In championing this structure, Macaulay was doing more than offering institutional suggestions; she was articulating a broader republican commitment to civic equality, moral independence, and the diffusion rather than concentration of power, commitments that shaped her historical writing as much as her political theory.

Macaulay’s work was well received. The Monthly Review called her Remarks sensible and written with spirit. [18] The London Magazine reprinted excerpts of her writing and the Critical Review called it an excellent pamphlet. If there were to have been any criticism from the reviewer, it was that Macaulay had ever bothered to take Hobbes seriously. The reviewer thought such an attack on Hobbes was irrelevant when “the principles of liberty are now so well understood, that Hobbism is every where sufficiently exploded.” [19] In other words, the review did not see Macaulay’s critiques of his understanding of liberty as particularly new. Placed within her broader corpus, the pamphlet reveals how Macaulay’s position as a woman historian not only shaped her reading of classical antiquity but also informed a distinctive vision of republican government attentive to civic equality and the limitations of hierarchical authority.

A Short Analysis of Hobbes’ De Cive Frontispiece

The frontispiece to Hobbes’ De Cive is striking, encapsulating the central message of his political teachings on the relationship between nature and the civil. Indeed, Hobbes’ frontispiece illustrates, quite literally, the argument of the work on its page. Jean Matheus, the French engraver who published the first edition of De Cive in Paris in 1642, visually represents the opposition between absolute liberty and civil order, a conventional metaphor for the contrast between the anarchy of nature and the order of the city. [1] Yet, at the same time, the image prompts the reader to examine what lies behind the curtain that physically veils the center field between liberty and sovereignty. [2]

The lower panel of the engraving depicts Libertas, on the right, and Imperium, on the left, both represented by female figures standing on pedestals. Libertas’ arrow points downward, in anticipation of damnation at Christ’s final judgment, which is depicted in the scene above her in the “Religio” panel. Libertas is shown as fearful and anxious, likely based on contemporary visual representations of Indigenous Americans in the works of John White or Theodore De Brye, which Hobbes would have been familiar with. [3] Theodore Christov suggests Libertas might be an Algonquian woman from coastal Carolina, a tribe whose name in their indigenous language was “densely inhabited land.” [4] Behind Libertas are scenes associated with nature: uncultivated lands and huts with cypress trees. [5]

Unlike Libertas, Imperium projects a commanding, regal presence, taller and clad in sandals and a toga, invoking the free Roman citizen and symbolizing lawful authority and social order. With the scales of justice in her right hand and a sword in her left pointing upward, Imperium’s gaze exudes peacefulness. Unlike the traditional Renaissance depiction of justice, where a blindfold signals foolishness, Imperium is clear-eyed, reminiscent of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. Behind Imperium is an image of village life with scenes of order: people cultivate land with sickles and reap their crops, and churches tower above the city. Agriculture and religion seem to transform a primitive condition of savagery into well-ordered society. Like Hobbes might argue, the distinctive mark of city life is unconditional obedience to a sovereign authority (in contrast to unbounded liberty in nature). [6]

Although the lower panel initially appears to present a stark dichotomy between nature and civil order, a closer examination of the center space suggests a more nuanced relationship. At first glance, De Cive’s frontispiece captures the canonical interpretation of Hobbes’ theory of the state, one relying on a dichotomy between the natural and the civil. This interpretation, however, does not focus on center field and what may lie between the natural and civil scenes in the panel. The space between Libertas and Imperium, occupying an equal third of the lower panel, is draped by curtains bearing the title of the book along with a verse from the Book of Proverbs. [7] There is no sharp break between the two scenes; instead, symmetry prevails, with rolling hills and a continuous horizon uniting both sides. The image seems to ask the reader how nature and sovereignty might meet halfway and relate to each other, and what image of that relationship Hobbes might have us construct in that space veiled by the curtain. 

Works Cited, Macaulay’s Refute to Hobbes

1. Catharine Macaulay, Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to Be Found in Mr. Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society : With a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government in a Letter to Signior Paoli by Catharine Macaulay the Second Edition with Two Letters One from an American Gentleman to the Author Which Contains Some Comments on Her Sketch of the Democratical Form of Government and the Author’s Answer (London: printed for W. Johnston in Ludgate-Street. T. Davies in Russel-Street Covent-Garden. E. and C. Dilly in the Poultry. J. Almon in Piccadilly. Robinson and Roberts in Pater-Noster Row. and T. Cadell in the Strand, 1769), 29.
2. Macaulay C. Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s ‘Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society’, with a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government, in a Letter to Signor Paoli (1767). In: Skjönsberg M, ed. Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press; 2023:85.  While she believed that representative democracy was superior to direct democracy, she was clear that the people should ‘give directions’ to their representatives, a topical issue to which she would return in An Address to the People of England, Scotland and Ireland (1775).
3. Others of his works are also important in understanding his political philosophy, especially his history of the English Civil War, Behemoth (published 1679), De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681), and The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). Hobbes political philosophy includes The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (also under the titles Human Nature and De Corpore Politico) published in 1650, De Cive (1642), which Macaulay wrote her Loose Remarks on, published in English as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in 1651, the English Leviathan published in 1651, and its Latin revision in 1668. It might also be helpful to outline Hobbes political philosophy across his range of publications to situate how Macaulay read De Cive. Indeed, Hobbes’ description of how persons should become subjects to a sovereign authority changed from his Elements and De Cive to his Leviathan. In the former, each person should lay down their rights (of self-government and to pursue the things they judge useful and necessary for their lives) in favor of one sovereign person (either a monarch or a rule-governed assembly). In Elements and De Cive, sovereigns alone would retain their right of nature to act on their own private judgement in all matters, and exercise the transferred rights of their subjects. The sovereign’s actions, whether exercising its own retained rights or those transferred from the subjects, is attributable to the sovereign itself, and bears moral responsibility for those actions. In contrast, Leviathan has each individual covenanting to “own and authorize” all of the sovereign’s actions (whatever the sovereign does as a public figure or commands of its subjects) (Lloyd, Sharon A. and Susanne Sreedhar, “Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/hobbes-moral/>.).  This change creates an inconsistency in Hobbes’ theory of responsibility for actions done at a sovereign’s command; if in “owning and authorizing” all their sovereign’s actions, subjects become morally responsible for all it does and all they do in obedience, Hobbes could not maintain his position that merely obedient actions in response to sovereign commands are the moral responsibility of the sovereign alone. Despite this, Macaulay is more concerned with the overall claim that individuals ought to submit themselves to one sovereign power and forego their rights of nature. 
4. Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 86.
5. Ibid, 3, 5.
6. For example, in her 1778 History of England … in a Series of Letters to a Friend, she writes that the reign of Queen Anne “was a glaring example to shew the ticklish state in which society is involved, whose welfare depends on the conduct of an individual” ( Macaulay, History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend, 1778, Bath: R. Cruttwell, 271). To Macaulay, the individual monarch could, and often did, fall victim to moral deficiencies which poorly affected entire nations of persons. 
7. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 74.
8. Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 6-7.
9. Macaulay, History, Volume IV, 1678, 430-1. 
10. Macaulay further disputes Hobbes’ views on parental and filial obligations, a theme later elaborated in her Letters on Education (1790). Whereas Hobbes claimed there are no natural moral rights and obligations between parents and children, Macaulay claimed that parents have an obligation to care for children, deriving from the nature of the relationship between them: “reason and morality strongly urges the care and preservation of an existence by themselves occasioned as a duty never to be omitted; by the law of justice, therefore, they, being thus bound to this act, cannot have it in their option whether they will do it or not: but Mr. Hobbes will rather advance any absurdity, than own that power has its rights from reasonable causes” (Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 10). In contrast, children’s obligations to their parents were grounded in gratitude, which is appropriate in relationship to the benefits they conferred from their parents, and as such are not binding if parents do not fulfill their duties to children.
11. Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 13.
12. Ibid., 23.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. Macaulay was actually quite disappointed by Paoli’s presence in London. In 1770, she wrote to Benjamin Rush, “Ever since Paoli has resided in England he has been in the hands of the Ministry, receives a pension from them and has been seen by very few of the friends of Liberty and consequently is totally disregarded by the people” (The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, ed. Karen Green (Oxford, 2019), 71). 
16. Horace Walpole, Memoirs and Portraits, ed. Matthew Hodgart (rev. ed., London, 1963), 213.
17. The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, ed. Karen Green (Oxford, 2019), 68.
18. [William Rose], ‘Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be found in Mr Hobbes’s Rudiments of Government’, The Monthly Review or Literary Journal 36, April (1767), 328.
19. “Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be found in Mr Hobbes’s Rudiments of Government,” The Critical Review or Annals of Literature 23 April (1767), 284–​8.

Works Cited, Hobbes’ Frontispiece

1. Christov T. Hobbes Before Anarchy. In: Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought. Cambridge University Press; 2016: 38.
2.  It is not uncommon for seventeenth-century frontispieces to depict the title on an ornate curtain and elaborate draperies, including that of the famous frontispiece of Leviathan, covered in the middle by an embroidered curtain, which bears the same pattern as the veil used to conceal the holy “ark of the testimony,” as depicted in The Book of Exodus (The Book of Exodus 26:31. On the meaning of the curtain in Levithan’s frontispiece, see Bredekamp (2007). What makes De Cive’s curtain unusual, however, is that it covers a single panel, rather than multiple smaller panels (Christov, Hobbes Before Anarchy, 38).
3. Goldsmith, M.M. (1981). “Picturing Hobbes’s Politics? The Illustrations to Philosophical Rudiments,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44, pp. 232–237.
4. Skinner, Quentin (2008). Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge, 99-102, and Tuck, Richard (1991). Hobbes: Leviathan, Cambridge, xxv-xxvi. The Algonquians’ complex social organization was largely based in the authority of mothers, similar to the Amazonian women, “where,” as Hobbes adduces, “women have sovereign power [over their 38 husbands]” (Aravamudan, Srinivas (2009). “Hobbes and America,” in Carey, Daniel and Festa, Lynn (eds.), Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theory, Oxford, 45).
5. Hobbes wrote, “The Savages of America” may not be the “Philosophers” of “Leasure” (neither were the ancient Greeks with their “unprofitable” philosophy), but they certainly “are not without some good Morall Sentences” and knowledge of “a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers” in the art of building (Hobbes, Thomas (1996), Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard, Cambridge, 491). He continued, one of the distinguishing marks of how “we [Europeans] differ from the wildest of Indians” in their sovereignty is not the emergence of building or philosophy as such, for the ancient cities of the Mexica and the Inca had in fact astonished the first Europeans, who compared them to cities back in Europe. It is, rather, their cultivation within civitas, where “whatsoever either elegant or defensible in building” can be accomplished most considerably and the “arts and sciences do most flourish (Hobbes (1969), pp. 65–66). 
6.  Christov, Hobbes Before Anarchy, 40.
7. “Per me Reges regnant et legum conditores iusta decernunt” (“By me kings reign, and princes decree justice”), Book of Proverbs 8:15.