凯瑟琳·麦考利

作品

• 1763英国史：从詹姆斯一世即位到不伦瑞克王朝即位

  共八卷（1763—83），从共和派立场叙述从1603年到1688年革命的英国历史：为内战中的议会派和人民的反抗权辩护，被读作对休谟《英国史》的回应。

• 1790教育书简，附关于宗教与形而上学问题的评论

  写给一位虚构的霍滕西娅的书信：女孩和男孩应当一起、以相同的科目接受教育，因为两性之间的性格差异来自教育；针对卢梭对苏菲的教育，她主张德性对两性而言是相同的。

• 1790评尊敬的埃德蒙·柏克阁下的《法国革命论》

  以致斯坦霍普伯爵书信的形式对柏克的回应：建立在世袭习俗之上的权利是脆弱的，必须建立在普遍原则之上；麦考利为法国大革命辩护，并呼吁人民享有平等的代表权。

立场

Macaulay is on the map as a republican political thinker and an early theorist of women’s education. Her “History of England” from James I to the Revolution of 1688 was read as a counterpart to Hume’s: where Hume, a sceptic about the grounds of morality, was taken to be sympathetic to the Stuarts, she defended the parliamentarians of the Civil War and held that moral truths are eternal and knowable by reason. After she sent him her first volume in 1764, they argued by letter over whether a division of power established by custom is legitimate. In “Loose Remarks” (1767) she rejected Hobbes’s purely political account of the state, his contract theory and his view of parental duties, and appended a democratic constitution for Corsica. Against Burke she argued in 1770 that political corruption had its roots in aristocratic factions, and in 1790 that rights resting on inherited custom are fragile and must rest on universal principles, together with equal representation of the whole people. Her “Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth” (1783) joined a rationalist ethics to a doctrine of moral necessity. The “Letters on Education” (1790) argued that differences of character between the sexes are produced by education, criticised Rousseau’s education of Sophie and proposed that girls and boys be taught together. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed the book and in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) called her the woman of the greatest abilities that England had produced.

生平与背景

Catharine Sawbridge was born on 2 April 1731 at Olantigh near Wye in Kent into a wealthy landed family and educated at home, largely through her own reading of Roman and English history. In 1760 she married the Scottish physician George Macaulay, who died in 1766. The first volume of her “History of England” appeared in 1763, the eighth and last in 1783. Her London house became a meeting place of radical Whigs; her brother John Sawbridge was a leading radical in the City of London and its Lord Mayor in 1775. Her marriage in 1778 to William Graham, who was 21, brought public ridicule and cost her many supporters. In 1784–85 she travelled in the United States and stayed with George Washington at Mount Vernon. In 1790 she published the “Letters on Education” and her reply to Burke’s “Reflections”. She died at Binfield in Berkshire on 22 June 1791.

其他主要作品

• The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (8 vols., 1763–83)
• Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society (1767)
• Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
• A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783)
• Letters on Education (1790)
• Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790)