Editing Thomas Babington Macaulay (section)

==Political writing==
Macaulay's political writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the [[Whig interpretation of history]]. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the ''[[Edinburgh Review]]'' and other publications, which were collected in book form and a steady best-seller throughout the 19th century. But it is also reflected in ''History''; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the "[[Glorious Revolution]]" of 1688.

Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. [[Karl Marx]] referred to him as a 'systematic falsifier of history'.{{sfn|Marx|1906|p=788|loc=Ch. XXVII|ps=: "I quote Macaulay, because as a systematic falsifier of history he minimizes facts of this kind as much as possible."}}  His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero [[William III of England|William III]] of any responsibility for the [[Glencoe massacre]]. [[Winston Churchill]] devoted a [[Marlborough: His Life and Times|four-volume biography]] of the [[Duke of Marlborough]] to rebutting Macaulay's slights on his ancestor, expressing hope "to fasten the label 'Liar' to his genteel coat-tails".{{sfn|Churchill|1947|p=132|ps=: "It is beyond our hopes to overtake Lord Macaulay. The grandeur and sweep of his story-telling carries him swiftly along, and with every generation he enters new fields. We can only hope that Truth will follow swiftly enough to fasten the label 'Liar' to his genteel coat-tails."}} Later historians have also highlighted his views on non-European cultures and philosophies as explicitly racist, citing, for example, his remark that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'.