 Those who have published commentaries on Macaulay’s views on freedom of the will are divided over exactly how the doctrine she develops fits into standard categories. Martina Reuter has argued that what Macaulay offers is a version of rationalist compatibilism, while others have presumed that she is a hard determinist or modern Calvinist (Reuter 2007; Hilton 2007, 67–72; O’Brien 2009, 168; Green and Weekes,2013). Part of the difficulty of understanding Macaulay’s position stems from the fact that she writes in opposition to those who make free choice arbitrary, and so concentrates on establishing that choices are caused by motives, thus seeming to be committed to compatibilism, as is Hobbes, and yet she also wants to accept, with Plato and the Stoics, that we are only truly free when our acts are caused by reason, rather than by ill-conceived passion. She understands individual moral progress as involving the strengthening of reason, so that it can guide the passions, and lead the individual to virtue. Political progress is intertwined with this individual progress. Political structures compatible with the rationally perceptible moral law would be upheld were people virtuous, so education for virtue becomes a necessary means for effecting political progress, yet at the same time, the effects of faulty constitutions militate against the capacity of people to attain virtue, since in circumstances of excessive inequality, or where corruption is endemic, both the poor and the rich are subject to overwhelming temptations to vice.