Confessions of a Macaulay Fan - Thomas Babington Macaulay

Reason, August, 2000 by Walter Olson

The great liberal historian appreciated on his bicentenary

Is the New Economy leaving behind a trail of exploited workers and uprooted communities? Has an overemphasis on tolerance gone so far as to disadvantage believers in true religion? Is free trade mostly a boon for the few, national sovereignty be damned? Why isn't the government doing more to improve the character and morality of a pleasure-obsessed populace?

Such questions were the talk of London in 1840, which is one reason I'm always urging people to read the historian-essayist-statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a figure overdue for rediscovery given the issues that agitate our current politics. Macaulay has a fair claim to being the most influential of the British classical liberals, and few would dispute that he's the most fun to read. Indeed, the extraordinary clarity, vividness, allusiveness, and energy of his writing style, conceded even by his enemies, won him from early on a huge following everywhere English was spoken. His work ran through endless reprints in 19th and early 20th century America--which makes him a great bargain on eBay--and he served as an influence on and model to Mencken, Churchill, and countless other writers.

These days Macaulay seems to survive mostly as a few familiar nuggets from Bartlett's: the one about how the Puritan hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators; the one about how there's no spectacle more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality; the not especially prescient one about how the American Constitution is all sail and no anchor; the one about how an acre in Middlesex is preferable to a principality in Utopia. All very well in their way, but oneliners make a poor introduction to a writer known for painting on such gigantic canvases: His History of England is among the longest standard works in English, and even the essays can take 10 or 20 pages to warm up before getting to their main theme.

Besides, none of those quotes catch the Whig historian in his most characteristic mood: filled with scorn and wrath at how those in government abuse their power. What propels the reader of his history through the long battle between court and country, between the party of state prerogative and the party of liberty, is the way Macaulay gets you to root for the latter much as one roots for a sports team. But the partisanship is not unrelenting: Constant strokes of characterization, often sharply at cross-purposes with the purely political sympathies, drive home how often folly, knavery, and vice of every sort can be found on the side that turns out to be right in politics, and how often uprightness and intelligence are found on the side that is wrong.

History, Macaulay once wrote, is "made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men," and those who idealize English institutions are likely to squirm at his portraits. The monarchy's occupants, naturally, come off badly, the feckless Stuarts above all. And the law? Even aside from the atrocious proceedings of the Star Chamber and High Commission, the state trials offer little more than a procession of "browbeating judges, packed juries, lying witnesses, clamorous spectators." Sir Edward Coke? A "pedant, bigot and brute," though eventually useful to the cause of liberty. Oxford? Forever squandering its venerable scholarship on devising the most laughably backward defenses for official prerogative.

The churches? "The doctrine which from the very first origin of religious dissensions has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong," he observed in one essay. "When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error." Each of the rival factions--High Church, Low Church, Catholics--persecuted cruelly when it got to power, and religious tolerance emerged at last in a kind of exhausted tumble when no faction could summon a majority for its designs.

An unabashed believer in economic freedom, Macaulay also makes clear the extent to which commercial and civil liberty grew up intertwined: The battle over arbitrary taxation (including the king's famed "ship-money") accounted for many gains in the struggle against arbitrary government conduct in general, while the fight to restrict unlimited search and seizure owed much to the popular resistance to tariffs and monopolies.

Somehow, freedom grew hardy amid the constant assaults, which is very much the Macaulayan concept of liberty: something built up over long agonies like a mass of scar tissue, abuse by abuse and resistance by resistance, its extent and solidity explainable by which bad officeholder had tried and failed to get away with which encroachment on the public during which reign. No one was less interested than he in a priori speculation about how governments ought to work, or more keenly interested in how from experience and observation they actually had worked. His caustic dismissal of the abstract reasonings of the utilitarian James Mill is perfectly characteristic: "We have here an elaborate treatise on Government, from which, but for one or two passing allusions, it would not appear that the author was aware that any governments actually existed among men."