Macaulay’s “Mill on Government,” published in the March 1829 issue of The Edinburgh Review, is a remarkable mixture of logical criticism, irony, mordant wit, and droll parody. That Mill’s Essay on Government is remembered at all today doubtless owes something to Macaulay’s memorable critique. The most remarkable feature of Macaulay’s critique is that it seems to be largely aloof from particular political issues, focusing instead on what we would nowadays call methodological matters. Against his older adversary the twenty-eight-year-old Macaulay defends the “historical” or “inductive” approach to the study of politics against Mill’s abstract, ahistorical, and “deductive” method. Macaulay maintains that we learn more from “experience” than from “theory,” and had best beware of the simplifications and “sophisms” to be found in Mill’s Essay on Government. The most pernicious of these is the “law” that men act always on the basis of self-interest. This law, Macaulay counters, is either trivially true (because logically circular) or patently false; in either case it hardly suffices as a foundation upon which to erect an argument for radical reform, much less a comprehensive theory of politics. And if Mill’s deductive logic fails, the entire edifice—including his supposedly “scientific” arguments in favor of radical reform—collapses with it (Macaulay 1992).