Thomas Babington Macaulay
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 223rd anniversary of the birth of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, FRS FRSE PC (25 October 1800–28 December 1859), who was born in Leicestershire, England, on this date in 1800, at the very beginning of the 19th century.
Macaulay is usually discussed in connection with his five-volume The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, and this work is usually identified as a paradigmatic case of the Whiggish conception of history, recently discussed in relationship to Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History. Twice in Volume 1 of his history, Macaulay appealed to the “progress of civilisation”:
“In the monarchies of the middle ages the power of the sword belonged to the prince; but the power of the purse belonged to the nation; and the progress of civilisation, as it made the sword of the prince more and more formidable to the nation, made the purse of the nation more and more necessary to the prince. His hereditary revenues would no longer suffice, even for the expenses of civil government. It was utterly impossible that, without a regular and extensive system of taxation, he could keep in constant efficiency a great body of disciplined troops. The policy which the parliamentary assemblies of Europe ought to have adopted was to take their stand firmly on their constitutional right to give or withhold money, and resolutely to refuse funds for the support of armies, till ample securities had been provided against despotism.”
And in this fascinating passage about Bath:
“That beautiful city which charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen, has made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and hedgerows intersected the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor patients to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a covert rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about sixty years after the Revolution has accurately described the changes which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that, in his younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in rooms hardly as good as the garrets which he lived to see occupied by footmen. The floors of the dining rooms were uncarpeted, and were coloured brown with a wash made of soot and small beer, in order to hide the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. Not a hearth or a chimneypiece was of marble. A slab of common free-stone and fire irons which had cost from three to four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace. The best-apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and were furnished with rushbottomed chairs. Readers who take an interest in the progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked.”
Here we can see Macaulay interested not in some abstract and ideal conception of progress, and not with political progress, but with the mundane manifestation of progress in the ordinary business of life. Reading this passage I was reminded of Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (published in 1785, almost three-quarters of a century prior to Macaulay’s work), in which he recorded Johnson’s and his appreciation of the comforts of civilization:
“We were favoured with Sir James Colquhoun’s coach to convey us in the evening to Cameron, the seat of Commissary Smollet. Our satisfaction of finding ourselves again in a comfortable carriage was very great. We had a pleasing conviction of the commodiousness of civilization, and heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature.”
This is a theme to be found throughout Boswell’s writings on Samuel Johnson, who seems to have rarely missed an opportunity to take issue with Rousseau’s primitivism. The relevance here is the progress of the useful arts, which are appreciated by Macaulay no less than by Boswell and Johnson. Perhaps we would have a kinder appreciation of Whiggish history if we focused on the development of the useful arts rather than focusing on the development of political progress, moral progress, and spiritual progress, all of which pose problems that are rather more intractable than progress in the useful arts. When it comes to technology and engineering, we can establish metrics that even those who reject civilization might well be willing to recognize in the abstract, even if the advance in technology meets with their disapproval.
Of course, it is the implied idea that English society had steadily converged upon some nearly-ideal state which is the criticism leveled at Macaulay and others accused of Whiggish history. The same criticism has been and is still used to target Hegel, as many are the authors who have claimed that Hegel saw the culmination of history in the Prussian state he knew in his lifetime, just as Macaulay has been targeted for his depiction of England as a light unto the nations.
The kind of metaphysical whiggish history that sees society as having steadily progressed toward the perfection of social institutions is, to my mind, far less evident in Macaulay than in contemporary 21st century historians, who seem bent on demonstrating the craven immorality of the past in comparison to the wonderful society that we enjoy today in the present. Indeed, when it comes to the metaphysical side of history, Macaulay appeals fate throughout his history, which implies necessity, although we should not be at all surprised, and should be hesitant to ascribe any definite meaning to a literary historian like Macaulay using the word “fate,” which so readily lends itself to historical wring. However, here is one particularly interesting use of “fate” by Macaulay:
“Before the civil wars, even those who most disliked the opinions and manners of the Puritan were forced to admit that his moral conduct was generally, in essentials, blameless; but this praise was now no longer bestowed, and, unfortunately, was no longer deserved. The general fate of sects is to obtain a high reputation for sanctity while they are oppressed, and to lose it as soon as they become powerful: and the reason is obvious. It is seldom that a man enrolls himself in a proscribed body from any but conscientious motives. Such a body, therefore, is composed, with scarcely an exception, of sincere persons. The most rigid discipline that can be enforced within a religious society is a very feeble instrument of purification, when compared with a little sharp persecution from without. We may be certain that very few persons, not seriously impressed by religious convictions, applied for baptism while Diocletian was vexing the Church, or joined themselves to Protestant congregations at the risk of being burned by Bonner. But, when a sect becomes powerful, when its favour is the road to riches and dignities, worldly and ambitious men crowd into it, talk its language, conform strictly to its ritual, mimic its peculiarities, and frequently go beyond its honest members in all the outward indications of zeal. No discernment, no watchfulness, on the part of ecclesiastical rulers, can prevent the intrusion of such false brethren. The tares and wheat must grow together. Soon the world begins to find out that the godly are not better than other men, and argues, with some justice, that, if not better, they must be much worse. In no long time all those signs which were formerly regarded as characteristic of a saint are regarded as characteristic of a knave.”
Macaulay’s occasion of invoking fate in this paragraph is a reflection on the English civil war, but we see that the greater part of this paragraph consists of a number of generalizations about the behavior of religious sects and individuals involved in religious sects — if I wanted to be tendentious, I could say that Macaulay is here outlining, in an admittedly sketchy way, some “laws of history” as they apply to many other historical contexts in which the necessity of fate also operates. Indeed, in this passage Macaulay makes a comparison to the persecutions of the Christians of the early church under Diocletian. The idea expressed in this passage that the godly are no better than other men is a familiar, if implicit, truth about human nature such as Pirenne saw as the function of history to explicate. It would not require much effort to extract a number of explicit general propositions about history from this passage and inquire as to their applicable scope in space and time, except that the literary and narrative character of history, together with a general disapproval of being too scientifically explicit, has militated against this. But this kind of historical thinking that we find here in Macaulay — and I believe this to be pretty representative of historians on the whole, and not something peculiar to “Whiggish” historians — introduces themes of generalization, albeit on a very subtle level that would be easy to ignore. Further, no one has bothered to make these subtleties explicit, as though that would seem to break the spell of the mellifluous prose.
It may seem a bit much to belabor the point, but a world in which laws of history can be identified, even laws of a very rough and general sort such as in the passage from Macaulay above, progress and Whiggish history must look very different from a world in which there are no laws of history and nothing at all can be predicted. Of course, we know that the ideas of a perfectly rule-governed deterministic history on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a perfectly voluntaristic history, are extreme end points of a continuum, neither of which are ever realized in practice. Contrary to Popper’s insistence that nothing can be predicted, we know that all men die, that all empires come to an end, and any number of banal generalizations of this kind. We may well deny that these are laws of history, but they certainly do shape history to a considerable degree. But these laws, if that is what they are, are far from exhaustive, and few would be willing to argue that every jot-and-tittle of history can be predicted on the basis of laws of any kind. History lies somewhere in the middle, between predictability and blind chance, and Macaulay lies somewhere on this scale between prediction and chance.
Macaulay himself can be read as a critic of Whiggish history, as in this passage:
“We read in our Saxon chronicles of tyrants, who, when at the height of greatness, were smitten with remorse, who abhorred the pleasures and dignities which they had purchased by guilt, who abdicated their crowns, and who sought to atone for their offences by cruel penances and incessant prayers. These stories have drawn forth bitter expressions of contempt from some writers who, while they boasted of liberality, were in truth as narrow-minded as any monk of the dark ages, and whose habit was to apply to all events in the history of the world the standard received in the Parisian society of the eighteenth century.”
The charge of Whiggish history, after all, is the charge of judging all of history by contemporary standards (a kind of inversion of historicism, as it were), which are to be understood as the norm by which all history is to be judged, and here we find Macaulay condemning this its earlier form of judging medieval tyrants by the standards of Parisian society of the eighteenth century.
Further Resources
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