Male Tyranny, Epistemic Bubbles, and Echo Chambers: Lessons from Macaulay
Elena Gordon

Letters on Education (1790) sees Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791) engage in a dialogue with an imaginary female interlocutor, Hortensia, about how education must proceed in order to make a just society possible. However, in one letter, titled “Sympathy,” Macaulay departs from this format and instead constructs the discussion as a dialogue between two male characters, Alcander and Lysimachus, who discuss the moral failures of men whose capacities for sympathy have not been appropriately developed through education. Why does Macaulay do this? And what does this reveal about the relationship between her account of sympathy and the continuing “tyranny of men” that she takes women to have endured? In this paper, I investigate what this discussion reveals about the connection between Macaulay’s views on sympathy and the persistence of male domination. I show that there are striking connections between Macaulay’s account of how men are educated and modern conceptions of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. I argue that her account provides insights into the transmission of sentiment between members of these spaces, and into the ways in which such transmission can help sustain beliefs that are epistemically spurious.

Elena Gordon is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Prior to taking up this position she was an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, an Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University, and Anderson Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. She received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2021. Her research principally focuses on the work of David Hume and Catharine Macaulay, and she has particular interest in theories of childhood development and feminism in eighteenth-century philosophy.