What Gives a Government the Right to Rule? The Radical Ideas of Catharine Macaulay

Imagine you’re playing a game in your school’s yard. The rules say anyone can join—but then someone’s older sibling shows up, declares themselves the permanent referee, and starts making up new rules on the spot. When you complain, they say: “The rules are whatever I say they are, because I’m in charge.”

You’d probably think that’s unfair. But why exactly? Is it just that you don’t like this person? Or is there something deeper—some standard of fairness that this referee is violating?

Now imagine the same question on a much bigger scale. What makes a government legitimate? Why should anyone have the right to tell millions of other people what to do? And when a government becomes unfair, do people have the right to overthrow it?

These are the questions that drove the 18th-century writer and historian Catharine Macaulay—a woman who was called “more deeply learned than becomes a fine lady,” who wrote a massive history of England to argue that the English people had rights their government was violating, and who became one of the first thinkers to argue that true democracy requires people to be educated as equals. She was controversial, radical, and mostly forgotten for 200 years. But her ideas are still alive in arguments we have today.

The Problem: Are Rights Just Customs?

To understand what Macaulay was arguing against, you need to know about another philosopher: David Hume. Hume was a brilliant Scottish thinker who noticed something strange about how people think about government.

Most people in Macaulay’s time (the 1700s) believed that the English constitution—the system of king, parliament, and courts—was basically good and should be respected. They pointed to traditions, to old laws written centuries ago, to the way things had “always” been done. The rights of English people, they said, came from English customs.

Hume took this idea and pushed it to its logical conclusion. He argued that there’s no such thing as “natural” rights or “eternal” moral truths. Instead, he said, governments are just conventions—agreements people have fallen into over time. Some countries have kings, some have parliaments, some have both. None of these systems is really right or wrong in any deep sense. What matters is that people get used to obeying them, and that makes society stable. The worst thing you can do is encourage people to question authority, because that leads to chaos.

Hume even said something that would make many modern readers uncomfortable: he wrote that the execution of King Charles I (during England’s civil war in the 1600s) was a tragedy brought on by “deluded enthusiasts” who didn’t understand that government is built on opinion, not truth.

Macaulay read Hume’s history and was horrified.

Macaulay’s Answer: There Are Real Rights

Macaulay believed that Hume had it exactly backwards. Rights aren’t just customs that could be different if history had taken another turn. They are real, grounded in what she called “the immutable nature of things”—a kind of moral truth that exists whether or not any human being or government recognizes it.

She thought there was a rule of “eternal right” built into the universe itself, like the laws of mathematics. Just as 2+2=4 whether or not you believe it, she argued, certain moral truths are true no matter what. You can discover them by using your reason—by thinking carefully about what is fair and just. And a government that doesn’t follow these truths isn’t really legitimate, even if it’s been in power for centuries.

This might sound abstract, but here’s what it meant in practice. When Hume said that governments get their authority from “custom and authority” (basically, from people being used to them), Macaulay shot back: if that’s true, then all reformers are criminals. Think about it. If obeying whatever government happens to exist is your only duty, then people who fought to end slavery, or who demanded voting rights for women, or who opposed unjust laws—they were all wrong to resist. You could never say that a law is unjust, because “justice” would just mean “whatever the powerful have made customary.”

Macaulay wouldn’t accept that. She wrote: “Opposition to established error must needs be opposition to authority”—which is her way of saying that if the authorities are wrong, you have to oppose them.

The Big Debate: Where Does Government’s Power Come From?

Macaulay developed her ideas by arguing with two other major thinkers: Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke. Each of them gave a different answer to the question of why governments have authority. Watching Macaulay take them apart shows you how her view works.

Hobbes (who wrote about 100 years before Macaulay) had a grim view of human nature. He thought that without a government, life would be a “war of all against all”—everyone fighting everyone else for survival. To escape this, people make a contract: they agree to give up their freedom to an absolute ruler (a king or assembly) who will keep the peace. The ruler doesn’t make a contract with the people—the people make a contract with each other to obey the ruler. Once that’s done, the ruler can do whatever they want, because the only alternative is chaos.

Macaulay thought this was nonsense. For one thing, she pointed out, a contract needs at least two parties. If the “people” dissolve into a single ruler, there’s no one left to hold the ruler accountable. The contract becomes meaningless. More importantly, she thought Hobbes was wrong about human nature. Humans aren’t just selfish creatures who need to be bullied into behaving. We are born with the capacity for reason, and reason can show us that we have obligations to each other. We are naturally social—not perfectly good, but capable of understanding right and wrong.

Burke was a later thinker, writing in response to the French Revolution of 1789. Burke argued that the revolutionaries were wrong to try to build a government from scratch based on abstract “rights of man.” Instead, he said, governments should grow slowly over time, like ancient trees, rooted in the customs and traditions of a particular people. He thought the English system—with its monarchy, aristocracy, and parliament—was good precisely because it had evolved over centuries. The rights of Englishmen, he insisted, came from English history, not from universal principles.

Macaulay demolished this argument. “If the rights of Englishmen are not ultimately grounded in abstract right,” she wrote, “they are no rights at all.” Here’s her logic: if your rights depend on the generosity of some long-dead king who gave them to you, then a later, more powerful king can take them away. Rights that are given by custom can be taken back by custom. The only protection against tyranny is to say that rights come from something higher than any government—from the nature of justice itself.

She put it in the form of a dilemma (a forced choice): either rights come from the will of some ruler (in which case they aren’t really rights), or they come from the people themselves (in which case the people have the right to change their government whenever it becomes unjust). There’s no middle ground.

What This Meant for Politics

Macaulay wasn’t just an armchair philosopher. She applied her ideas to real political problems of her day.

She wrote a multi-volume History of England that told the story of the English Civil War as a struggle by brave “patriots” standing up for their rights against kings who wanted absolute power. She was on the side of the parliamentarians who executed Charles I—not because she liked violence, but because she thought the king had violated the contract with his people.

She supported the American Revolution, arguing that the British had no right to tax the American colonies without giving them representation in Parliament. She even corresponded with many of the American founders and visited the United States after the war, where she was celebrated.

She criticized the British government of her own time for being corrupt. The real problem, she argued, wasn’t just that the king had too much power—it was that the rich had too much power, and that inequality was corrupting politics. She proposed a democratic constitution for the island of Corsica (which was fighting for independence) that included strict limits on wealth and regular elections to prevent anyone from accumulating too much power.

And perhaps most remarkably for her time, she argued that women should be educated exactly the same as men. She took on the famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had argued that women’s education should prepare them to please men. Macaulay responded that virtue is the same for everyone, because reason is the same for everyone. “There is but one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings,” she wrote. Then she added a line that would later influence Mary Wollstonecraft (the early feminist): “A perfect man is a woman formed after a courser mold.” In other words, if women seem less capable, it’s only because they’ve been denied the education that develops their minds.

A Difficult Question: What About Free Will?

This gets technical, but it matters for understanding Macaulay’s whole system. If you believe that there are moral truths that reason can discover, you need to explain how people can be free to choose to follow those truths—or not.

Macaulay argued that our choices are caused by our motives. Your reason presents you with reasons to act one way; your passions present you with reasons to act another. You choose based on which motive is strongest. This sounds like she’s saying we’re not really free—that our choices are determined by whatever motive happens to be strongest. But Macaulay said no: we are free precisely when our reason is in charge, guiding our passions. A person who acts on their passions isn’t really free in the deep sense—they’re a slave to their impulses. True freedom is acting according to reason.

This is a strange idea, but here’s what it accomplishes: it means that education becomes incredibly important. If people can learn to strengthen their reason and control their passions, they can become truly free. And if a society is set up justly—with equality, good laws, and education for everyone—people will naturally become more virtuous. But if a society is corrupt and unequal, people will be tempted into vice, and the whole system gets worse.

Why This Still Matters

Macaulay’s ideas disappeared for a long time. She was a woman writing in a time when women weren’t supposed to write about politics, and later historians mostly ignored her. But in the last 50 years, scholars have rediscovered her, and they’ve realized that she was saying things that challenge some of our basic stories about democracy.

Here’s one way to think about what she offers. We often hear two different arguments about rights. One says: rights are whatever the law says they are. The other says: rights come from a higher source—from God, or from nature, or from reason itself. Macaulay was firmly in the second camp. But she didn’t just claim that rights exist; she tried to explain how we can know what they are, and why they impose obligations on us.

She also insisted that democracy isn’t just about voting. It’s about creating citizens who are capable of thinking for themselves. That requires education, equality, and institutions that prevent anyone from accumulating too much power. Without those things, she argued, democracy will always collapse into corruption and tyranny.

She was optimistic about human progress. She believed that people could become better—more rational, more just—if given the right conditions. But she was also realistic: she knew that power corrupts, and that without constant vigilance, even good systems fall apart.

A Final Puzzle

Here’s something to think about. Macaulay believed that moral truths are “immutable”—they don’t change over time. But she also believed that people can discover more of these truths as they become more rational and educated. So she believed in moral progress, even though she thought the truths themselves were eternal.

Is that consistent? If moral truth doesn’t change, how can we get better at knowing it? And if we do get better at knowing it, how do we know we’re not just making it up?

Macaulay would say that this is exactly the kind of question a rational person should wrestle with. Her point wasn’t that she had all the answers. It was that the search for answers—using reason, arguing with each other, demanding justice—is what makes us free.

Key Terms

Term	What it means in this debate
Immutability of moral truth	The idea that right and wrong are fixed features of reality, not just customs or opinions
Social contract	The idea that government is based on an agreement between people (or between people and rulers)
Republicanism	The belief that political freedom requires citizens to be active participants in governing, not just subjects
Convention	A rule or practice that exists because people have agreed to follow it, not because it’s naturally right
Moral necessity	Macaulay’s view that our choices are caused by motives, but we are free when reason guides us
Rational self-interest	The idea that what’s truly good for you is to follow reason, even when it conflicts with your immediate desires

Key People

Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791): A historian and political philosopher who argued that true democracy requires equal education and that rights are grounded in universal moral truths, not traditions.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): A philosopher who argued that people must give absolute power to a ruler to avoid chaos; Macaulay disagreed with almost everything he said.
David Hume (1711–1776): A Scottish philosopher who argued that governments are based on convention and custom, and that moral truths aren’t real—only passions and interests matter.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797): A politician and writer who defended tradition and opposed the French Revolution; Macaulay argued that his view made rights meaningless.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797): An early feminist who was directly influenced by Macaulay’s ideas about women’s education and went on to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Things to Think About

Think about a rule at your school or in your family that seems unfair. If you wanted to argue that it should be changed, would you argue based on tradition (“we used to do it differently”) or on some deeper principle? What would that principle be?
If someone says “the majority voted for this, so it must be right,” are they making the same mistake Hume made? Can a democratic process produce an unjust outcome?
Macaulay thought that equality was necessary for democracy to work. But people have different talents, different amounts of money, different levels of education. How much inequality is too much? Who should decide?
Macaulay believed that true freedom means acting according to reason, not just doing whatever you want. Do you agree? If someone spends all day playing video games and avoiding their homework, are they “free”? If not, what are they?

Where This Shows Up

Arguments about human rights today: When people say that certain rights (like freedom from torture) are “universal” and shouldn’t depend on which country you’re in, they’re echoing Macaulay’s view that rights aren’t just customs.
Debates about education: Macaulay’s argument that equal education is necessary for democracy is still alive in discussions about school funding, public vs. private education, and what subjects should be taught.
Critiques of wealth inequality: When people argue that huge gaps between rich and poor threaten democracy, they’re making a version of Macaulay’s argument that inequality corrupts political systems.
The “tradition vs. reform” debate: Every time someone argues that we should keep things as they are because “that’s how it’s always been,” and someone else argues that tradition doesn’t justify injustice, they’re replaying Macaulay vs. Edmund Burke.