The structure of Hume’s historical thought before the History of England

ABSTRACT

David Hume’s historical thought was shaped before he even began writing the History of Great Britain in 1752. This article shows how Hume developed his historical thought in an attempt to combine two historical structures: the natural-jurisprudential conjectural history of the Treatise of Human Nature and the early eighteenth-century historical narratives of modern Europe that featured in his Essays. The Treatise’s conjectural history used the developmental categories “rude” and “civilised” to explain the origins of justice, government and the moral sentiment. The narratives of modern Europe, in contrast, revolved around the historical categories “ancient” and “modern.” Hume’s historical thought was shaped by the attempt to merge those two structures into a single, coherent structure. The critical question concerned the relation between the ancient and the modern: was modern Europe merely a “revival” of classical antiquity? Or did it have new, “post-ancient” dimensions? The article shows how Hume gradually distanced classical antiquity from modern Europe, thereby creating space for exclusively modern concepts such as “civilised monarchies” and the narrative of modern civilisation that structured his History of England (1754–1762). The paper concludes by suggesting that this structure defined Enlightenment philosophical history, not just Hume’s version of it.

KEYWORDS:

• David Hume
• philosophical history
• historical structures
• Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
• natural jurisprudence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Hume himself noticed in his short autobiography, see Hume, Essays, xxxvii (hereafter “Essays,” followed by page number). On Hume as a Tory historian, see Mossner, “Was Hume a Tory Historian?” On Hume and Jacobitism, see Skjönsberg, “David Hume and the Jacobites.” On Hume as oscillating between Tory and Whig views, see Wootton, “David Hume: ‘The Historian’.” The prevailing scholarly opinion, introduced by Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, ch. 5, considers Hume as a “sceptical Whig” and treats the History as an attempt to reject the vulgar Whig belief in the “ancient constitution.” Harris, Hume, ch. 7, stresses the similarity between Hume and the Court Whigs.

2 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 288. Elsewhere Forbes describes the History of Great Britain as “the most essentially European of all classic narrative histories of England,” see Forbes, “Introduction,” 22. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 83, agrees: Hume’s history of England is one of the leading narratives of Enlightenment, particularly in the Tudor volumes, where Hume consciously searches for continuities between British and European history.”

3 My concept of historical structure is indebted to Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity, esp. 7–11, notion of “regimes of historicity” and to Koselleck’s Futures Past, 255–275, notion of ‘spaces of experience’ and “horizons of expectation.” My choice to call my object a “historical structure” is meant to capture the architectonic role of the categories, objects and temporalities: they create an argumentative space within which different kinds of arguments (philosophical, historical, political, economic) and different textual genres (essay, narrative history, polemic) can be explored. As will be discussed below, Enlightenment philosophical history has too often been considered as a historical genre, whereas it should be understood as a combination of a historical structure and a historical method (which I would call a “mode of historical argument”).

4 We must distinguish between eighteenth-century self-perceptions and narratives of modern Europe and twentieth-century narratives of modernity. On that distinction see Pocock, “Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking’,” and, especially, Robertson, “Enlightenment and Modernity, Historians and Philosophers. ”

5 It should be noted that I am not saying natural-jurisprudential theories (or book III of the Treatise, for that matter) are a form of historical argument. However, intellectual historians such as Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property, have treated the natural-jurisprudential tradition after Grotius as “historicizing” property rights, that is, as affirming that property rights were developed as life in society developed. As such, natural law qua philosophical argument implied the existence of a history (or histories) of the development of property rights. Hume is generally understood by the literature to have impressed an even higher degree of historicization of natural law in the Treatise. Whether Hume’s historicization of natural law marks a departure from or an evolution of natural jurisprudence is a debatable question The latter interpretation is defended by Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator, and Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property. Westerman, “Hume and the Natural Lawyers: A Change of Landscape,” criticizes the natural-jurisprudential interpretation, but still retains the idea that Hume must be interpreted as reacting to that tradition. The “sociability” view, which situates Hume between Bernard Mandeville’s neo-Epicureanism and Francis Hutcheson’s natural sociability thesis, is advanced by Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, and Harris, Hume, ch 2. Independent of whether we interpret Hume as critical to or part of the natural jurisprudential tradition, its presence as a vocabulary in Book III of the Treatise is undeniable. Even the sociability interpretation acknowledges that much of the sociability debate used the language of natural jurisprudence.

6 “Ancient” and “Modern” are capitalized when referring to the parties of the Quarrel. The importance of the Quarrel in Hume’s intellectual biography was emphasized by Mossner, “Hume and the Ancient–Modern Controversy, 1725–1752.” Since then, only Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, Baumstark, “The Biographical Background of the Second Enquiry,” and Faria, “History, Moral Philosophy, and Social Theory in David Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1739–1752,” have investigated the subject. A full study of the influence of the Quarrel on Hume’s thought is still lacking. Hume is discussed briefly in some of the more recent literature concerning the Quarrel; see Edelstein, The Enlightenment, 106–108, and Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 120–30.

7 See Stewart, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, L.L.D.,” 292–296. Marušić, “Dugald Stewart on Conjectural History and Human Nature,” explores the ambiguities of Dugald Stewart’s position. Modern commentators avoid Stewart’s all-encompassing definition and favour the narrower definition I adopt here. See, for instance, Emerson, “Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers,” Malherbe, “Hume’s Natural History of Religion,” and Santos Castro, “Hume and Conjectural History.”

8 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.2.1.9. Hereafter “Treatise” followed by book, part, section, paragraph, quoted in the text. Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue, ch. 1, discusses the importance of Hume’s choice of loan repayment as his starting point.

9 Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue, ch. 2, and Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 85–86, discuss the almost exclusive focus of Treatise 3.2 on the interested affection.

10 Hume, Treatise, 3.2.4, 3.2.5 and 3.2.5.10, respectively.

11 Hume wrote in Treatise 3.2.2.8: “This partiality, then and unequal affection, must not only have an influence on our behavior and conduct in society, but even in our ideas of vice and virtue.” Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 171 and 177–179, argues for the importance of artifice even in the judgement of the natural virtues. On Hume’s general point of view, see Sayre-McCord, “On Why Hume’s ‘General Point of View’ Isn’t Ideal–and Shouldn’t Be.” On pride of possessions and the conventions of justice, see Besser-Jones, “The Role of Justice in Hume’s Theory of Psychological Development.”

12 In Treatise 3.2.2.23, Hume pointed to section 3.3.1 as the explanation of the moral approbation of justice.

13 Wennerlind, “David Hume’s Political Philosophy.”

14 Treatise 3.2.2.8 and 3.2.8.1, for instance.

15 Hume to Adam Smith, 24 September 1752, in Hume, Letters, vol. 1, 167–168.

16 Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 239, notes that Hume’s conventions of justice presupposed a reasonable degree of equality in possessions anterior to the stabilisation of property, as otherwise those without possessions would have no interest in adhering to the conventions in the first place. Pye, “Histories of Liberty,” provides an interpretation of the History of England and Hume’s view of the Civil War compatible with the interpretation I advance here.

17 Gill, The British Moralists, 239. Harris, Hume, 253–254, also emphasizes Hume’s multitasking in Book III of the Treatise, contrasting it with the second Enquiry, where, as we shall see, the attempt to build a conjectural history of morals is dropped.

18 Hume mentions possible fourth and fifth books of the Treatise concerning criticism and politics in the advertisement to Books I and II of the Treatise, see Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2. Harris, Hume, 141–142, suggests a conjectural history of forms of government would most likely be the content of the planned fifth book.

19 Hereafter “Civil Liberty” and “Rise and Progress” respectively. Harris, Hume, ch. 3, divides the two volumes into three kinds of essays: those on politics (primarily English), the polite “Addisonian” essays (many of which Hume later withdrew) and the essays directed at a more erudite audience and addressing topics deriving from the Quarrel.

20 The roots of the twentieth-century treatment of the Quarrel can be found in Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes. Hazard, La Crise de La Conscience Européenne, is the canonical expression of that view of the Quarrel, which can still be found in Levine, The Battle of the Books, notwithstanding the latter’s attention to the questions concerning historical narratives that became important in the recent literature. For recent investigations of the Quarrel focusing on the perceptions of historicity, see Yılmaz, Le Temps Moderne, Edelstein, The Enlightenment, and Norman, The Shock of the Ancient.

21 Hume’s interest in the Ancient position as expressed by Jean-Baptiste Dubos is particularly important, but remains to be fully studied, as I argued in Faria, “History, Moral Philosophy, and Social Theory in David Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1739–1752,” chs. 2–3. Hume explored Dubos’s arguments (almost always disagreeing with Dubos) in almost all his works, from Book I of the Treatise to “Of the Standard of Taste,” including such unexpected references as the quote regarding Roman climate in “Populousness”; see Essays, 448–449. On Hume and Dubos, see Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, and Mazza and Mori, “‘Loose Bits of Paper’ and ‘Uncorrect Thoughts’.”

22 Essays, 94.

23 On ancient and modern prudence, see Harrington, Harrington, 8–9. On this topic, see Pocock, “Introduction,” 43–75. On the Harringtonian dimension of Hume’s political thought, see Harris, Hume, 175–183, Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 207–211, and Pye, “Histories of Liberty.”

24 Essays, 89–90.

25 Ibid., 115–119.

26 Ibid., 123–124.

27 Ibid., 119–123.

28 Ibid., 88–89.

29 Ibid., 95–96.

30 Ibid., 127–128.

31 As noticed by Harris, Hume, 188. Forbes, “Introduction,” 22, emphasises Hume’s Francophilia, which is neglected by most Hume scholars to this day. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 120–126, compares Hume and Perrault’s accounts of modern politeness.

32 The essay is reprinted in Wright, “‘Hume on the Origin of ‘Modern Honour’: A Study in Hume’s Philosophical Development.” See pp. 205–207 for the passage on chivalric politeness as a corruption of Roman imperial manners.

33 Sakamoto, “Hume’s Political Economy as a System of Manners,” 89–90.

34 Essays, 118.

35 Ibid., 116.

36 Pocock, “Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking,” 57, suggested that, from the eighteenth-century point of view, their own age was “post-modern,” in the sense that “modern” had until then been understood as post-ancient and associated with the Christian millennium. The commercial age increasingly looked like a further development of the Christian millennium, with commerce added to societies still largely based on semi-feudal legal structures and Christianity. The flip side of the repositioning of classical antiquity I analyse here is the increasingly important role of (what we call) the medieval as the source of the modern, but that must be analysed in a different place.

37 Essays, 225.

38 Ibid., 256–258.

39 Essays, 259. Faria, “David Hume, the Académie des Inscriptions and the Nature of Historical Evidence in the Early Eighteenth Century,” discusses how Hume’s historical method relates to that statement.

40 On Plato’s Republic, see Treatise 2.3.1.10. On Hobbes’s Leviathan, see EPM 3.15, footnote 11.

41 McArthur, David Hume’s Political Theory, 90.

42 Essays, 260–264.

43 Ibid., 271.

44 Ibid., 277.

45 Hume was very much aware that Ludovican France had undergone a conflict between the crown and the cities on the one side and the nobility on the other, similar to the English conflict. The first topic of his response to Montesquieu concerned the role of “intermediate powers,” showing his interest in the constitutional role of a nobility see Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, 133–138. For references on this topic, see footnote 79 below.

46 On the centrality of theories concerning the “agrarian trap” (and the way out of it) in the Enlightenment see Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World of Liberty, Wealth and Equality. Macfarlane, “David Hume and the Political Economy of Agrarian Civilization,” covers Hume’s case. Berry, “Hume and the Customary Causes of Industry, Knowledge, and Humanity,” 313, argues, correctly in my view, that the two essays were a “potted version” of the structure of the History of England.

47 Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment, 40, also interprets Hume as unambiguously locating classical societies in the rude camp.

48 On Hume’s discussion of ancient slavery, see Watkins, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays, 66–80, and Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, ch. 6.

49 Essays, 383–4.

50 Ibid., 415.

51 Ibid., 414.

52 Ibid., 416.

53 Essays, 411. On Hume’s method of reading sources against the grain, see Baumstark, “Hume'’s Reading of the Classics at Ninewells,” and Box and Silverthorne, “The ‘Most Curious & Important of All Questions of Erudition’: Hume’s Assessment of the Populousness of Ancient Nations.”

54 Essays, 418–419.

55 Hume, The History of England, vol. 2, 207.

56 Essays, xxxvi.

57 The recent revisions of the role of the second Enquiry have been collected in Taylor, Reading Hume on the Principles of Morals, and Kroeker and Lemmens, Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: A Critical Guide.

58 This is noted by Harris, “Justice in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” and Hanvelt, “History, Context, and the Conventions of Political Society,” 88.

59 Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3.13. Hereafter “EPM” followed by section and paragraph number (“App” for the appendixes and “D” for “A Dialogue”).

60 EPM, 3.34, footnote 12. See also the variorum (EPM, 220). The influence of Montesquieu on the second Enquiry is noted by Harris, Hume, 250–253, and Baumstark, “David Hume,” 48–65. As Harris suggests, the second Enquiry shows much less confidence on “human nature” as a monolithic thing, given precedence to historical diversity.

61 On section four of the second Enquiry, see Hanvelt, “History, Context, and the Conventions of Political Society,” 88.

62 EPM, 3.21.

63 EPM, 9.8, footnote 57.

64 EPM, D.51. See also EPM, 6.35.

65 EPM, D.47.

66 EPM, 7.2. Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, 148–152. See also Watkins, “Virtues Sublime and Suspect,” 145.

67 EPM, App 3.5–6. Interpreters have highlighted the expansion of the role of reason in Hume’s work as he developed his ideas; see Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue, 246–247. By the time Hume wrote the last volume of the History of England, he was arguing that virtue “is nothing but a more enlarged and cultivated reason”; see Hume, History of England, vol. 1, 179. See also Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, 122–125, and Hanley, “Justice and Politics in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” 66–71.

68 EPM, 2.21.

69 Both expressions are Watkins’s, “Virtues Sublime and Suspect,” 137 and 146 respectively. On the contrast between sublime ancient virtues and the humane modern social virtues, see Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, 161–163.

70 EPM, 7.13.

71 Ibid., 7.25.

72 Ibid., 7.16–17 and 7.4–10 respectively.

73 Ibid., 7.18

74 Essays, 413.

75 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 96–97, argues that “‘ancient prudence’ was Spartan and Roman, a commonwealth of armed freeholders which had been corrupted and feudalized by emperors and their Gothic mercenaries, but might now be restored to its true principle in England in consequence of the decay of military tenures,” which he termed a “process of classicization”.

76 Hume’s critique of Harrington appears in Hume, History of England, vol. 4, 384.

77 See Hume to Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, 16 June 1768 in Hume, Letters vol. 1, 180. On French theories of progress after Fontenelle’s 1688 contribution to the Quarrel, the “Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes,” see Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain dans la pensée française de Fontenelle à Condorcet.

78 On Hume’s interest in the role of the nobility in preventing the chaotic consequences of public debt, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 125–141, esp. 138–141, Hont, “The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy,” esp. 345, and Pye, “Histories of Liberty,” 174–177. On the notion of “intermediate powers” in early eighteenth-century French political thought and in the “aristocratic liberalism” that emerged from there see Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, ch. 1, and Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, ch. 2.

79 Essays, 349–51.

80 À la Telemachus, would be more precise. As Hont, Politics in Commercial Society, 105 (apparently unironically) suggests, the reforms proposed in Fénelon, Telemachus, amounted to a revolution in social and economic structures on the same scale as those implemented by Mao and Pol Pot. Hanley, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, 49–82, presents Fénelon’s actual – and much more moderate – economic plans outside of his best-selling educational fable.

81 Molière, Oeuvres de Molière, vol. 9, 370.

82 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 166.

83 On Dugald Stewart, see note 7 above. For the standard twentieth-century narratives of Enlightenment philosophical history, see Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, ch. 1, and Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, ch. 5. More recent accounts such as O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, and Phillips, Society and Sentiment, still start from the great philosophical historians without investigating what had made possible the changes we see in their texts.

84 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, 412.

85 Pye, “Histories of Liberty in Scottish Thought,” has shown how Hume distanced himself from most of his fellow enlightened Scots, including Smith, and favoured a more positive view of what Montesquieu called the “intermediate ranks” (of feudal origin) that moderated modern monarchies

86 See, for instance, Halikias, “Adam Smith on the Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Commercial Society” and Bowles, “Adam Smith and the ‘Natural Progress of Opulence’.” Both authors note the issues between the conjectural history of chapter one of Book III of the Wealth of Nations and the actual history presented in the remaining chapters of the book. For a history of interpretations of the relation between Smith’s four-stage conjectural history and his analysis of actual history see Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered, 20, footnote 10.

87 Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered, 20.

88 Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered, esp. 45–53.

89 Perinetti, “Philosophical Reflection on History,” 1117–1121, suggests (but does not substantiate) that Enlightenment philosophical history emerged from the encounter between the ancient–modern debates and natural jurisprudence. The idea of philosophical history as the combination of different forms of historical argument is also present in Miller, “Introduction: Momigliano, Antiquarianism, and the Cultural Sciences.” However, Miller suggests philosophical history emerged from the combination of erudite history and the ancient–modern debate during the Quarrel. I have suggested elsewhere that the evolution of eighteenth-century erudite history was indeed essential to the consolidation of the foundations of eighteenth-century historical method; see Faria, “David Hume, the Académie des Inscriptions and the Nature of Historical Evidence in the Early Eighteenth Century.”

90 On Enlightenment and historical method at the Académie des Inscriptions, see Matytsin, “Enlightenment and Erudition” and Faria, “David Hume, the Académie Des Inscriptions and the Nature of Historical Evidence in the Early Eighteenth Century.”

91 On the medievalist Branch of the Académie des Inscriptions, see Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and the Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye. On Henri de Boulainvilliers, see Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France. On Dubos’s historical thought, see Kaiser, “Rhetoric in the Service of the King: The Abbe Dubos and the Concept of Public Judgment.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro Faria

Pedro Faria is a visiting postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and Regional Planning (Cedeplar) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil.