Can Political History Also Be a People's History?: The Case of Thomas Babington Macaulay

Because his History of England (4 vols., 1853-55) is the foremost exemplar of Whiggish history and the Whig fallacy, Macaulay is much scorned and scarcely read—to the extent that anyone even thinks about him at all. But there remain many reasons why we should at least understand him in his times and should read this elegant and gripping biography, a lifetime achievement. Robert Sullivan, a classically educated historian (essential in order to keep pace with Macaulay), has a shrewd observation about TBM's famous "chapter three," a stop-the-clock slice of time that profiles late seventeenth-century England.¹

He notes that some of Macaulay's ideas seemed novel when they were independently rediscovered by others during the twentieth century. Jürgen Habermas, for example, built a notable career on a theory about the appearance of the public sphere—"private people gathered as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state"—in early modern Europe, beginning with Britain. "Macaulay [had already] sketched the theory—including the pivotal role of coffeehouses as meeting places" (p. 284).

One of TBM's favorite expressions, the "public mind," prompts one to recall Perry Miller's two big volumes devoted to The New England Mind (1939, 1953), and Henry Steele Commager's The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (1950). How very much has been expostulated in our historiographical and methodological essays for a generation past about the dangers of invoking monolithic "minds," public or private, in heterogeneous and hierarchical societies. Macaulay believed with assurance that he understood and keened the upper-class English mind, and it doesn't appear that he ascribed any sort of mind that mattered at all to the working classes, which he conceived of not just lumpishly but as an undifferentiated lump. He had not read Raymond Williams' classic essay "Culture Is Ordinary."

Why is this long and profoundly learned book being reviewed in this journal, and why should historians of the United States take notice? Because Sullivan's analysis of the way Macaulay wrote and thought about history should prompt us to think more deeply about our own vocation and how it has evolved. Also because it is about imperialism viewed comparatively (India, Ireland, etc.), and it is very much about history and power. Macaulay's famous essay "History" (1828) remained influential for generations. (Theodore Roosevelt doted on TBM's work and shaped his own histories accordingly.)²

Macaulay should also be read because the human-interest profile that emerges goes very deep: how can a superior mind and elite education result in such racist and inhumane rationalizations for the misuses of power? TBM's image and influence feel infinite and resonate pervasively. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's alter ego hears a priest declare: "'I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably never committed a mortal sin in his life, that is to say, a deliberate mortal sin'" (quoted by Sullivan, p. 205).

Macaulay insisted that in England "the history of the government, and the history of the people" were "a inseparable conjunction and intermixture" (pp. 282-83). Unfortunately, he had very little to say about the menu peuple, but many other writers made similar assumptions, and that should prompt us to wonder how our profession got from there to Howard Zinn's immensely popular and extraordinarily influential A History of the American People (1980). TBM's most admired models were Herodotus for narrative drive to engage the reader and Thucydides for clarity and the goal of objectivity. He also admired Tacitus, a politically active Roman historian and ethnographer, for the explanation and judgment of imperial regimes, a challenge that's germane to TBM's History of England.

Although Macaulay traveled extensively, he never visited two places that one might have anticipated as being predictable lodestars. He never went to Greece, despite being a brilliant...