future events, “and these confer not legitimacy but, necessarily, illegitimacy on the present society.”30
There are several difficulties with Livingston’s analysis of Hume’s attack on providential history. First, Hume’s strictures against those who “reverse the whole course of nature” by making this life “merely a passage to something further” are aimed at those who act for the sake of life in the world to come, a supernatural mode of existence. Inferences to a historical future are something quite different from inferences to an eternal future, and Hume’s attack does not clearly encompass the former, only the latter. Hume focuses on the difficulty of making new inferences from a cause whose existence has been inferred from a single work or production. “The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single being in the universe, not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities, we can, by analogy, infer any attribute or quality in him” (EHU 11.26/144). We can thus infer from experienced effect to divine cause, but cannot infer from this anything that we have not actually experienced as caused by God. Given that human nature and agency are not, unlike God and the universe, a “single work or production,” but rather something of which we have experienced very many instances, we can legitimately construct covering laws governing human agency and use these to infer to the future. The problem with providential history, in Hume’s eyes, is thus not its reference to the future as such, but its claim that God is the cause of history, and more particularly with claims to know a future beyond history.
Second, even if Hume were successful in undermining the possibility of inferences from past or present to the future, this would not (as Livingston concedes) render illegitimate attempts to predict the future, hope for the future, or hypothesize about the future. Nor does it undercut criticism of the present order on the basis of an imagined and hoped-for future. This is important, since it is not at all clear that all forms of providential history, or even all forms of providential history present in eighteenth-century thought, involve a claim to know the future, to view the future as though it has already happened. Some forms of providential history look to the restoration of a past golden age, thus conforming to Livingston’s stricture that the past be the source for present legitimacy.31 Some combine keen hope for the future with an insistence on the impossibility of knowing the future, often rooted in Jesus’s reminder that “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). Some see the end of history as inevitable but regard events within history as themselves open, an arena for free, undetermined human action. Some expect catastrophe to usher in a new transhistorical age, while others, focusing on the notion of a millennium, expect gradual improvement culminating in a new historical golden age; the latter, at least, are hardly alienated from the present or tempted to violent revolution.32 And while there were many eighteenth-century theologians who thought it was possible and worthwhile to offer rational proofs of the existence of a future life beyond history, or, like Joseph Priestley, to attempt to discern in contemporary events the guiding hand of God, such efforts are not necessary concomitants of Christian or other sorts of religious faith and indeed have been subject to theological critique as misguided assertions of the power of human reason where a stance of faith is more appropriate. What is needed, then, is a more fine-grained description, which is capable of differentiating among a variety of Christian views of history, all of which might be termed providential in some sense, but not all of which are subject to Livingston’s critique. One result will be that Hume’s own grand story line of the improvement of the human mind will no longer appear sharply distinct from at least some forms of providential history. Hume rejected providential history but embraced his own teleology of progress, one that appealed not, as did nineteenth-century historiography, to an abstract scheme, but one that embodied hope for the future.33As Noel Jackson notes, “Hume offered a mode of historiography that catered to the needs of a credit economy that depended for its own prosperity upon the image of a stable and largely secular future.”34 Hume’s ordering of the past certainly orients him to the future in a particular way; he hopes for the triumph of the “party of humankind” and for the demise of the monkish virtues, even as his inferences based on past experiences of human nature do not give him excessive confidence that his hopes will be realized. To be able to speak of improvements of the human mind implies not only a point of departure judged vicious or imperfect, but also an imagined perfection of the human mind, in light of which the present is discerned as improved but still imperfect.35
Finally, it is hardly clear that providential history is “in total alienation from the standards that constitute the present social and political order.”36 The present can be viewed as “passing” and “inadequate” without therefore being regarded as “illegitimate,” but Livingston suggests that the former implies the latter.37 In fact, Hume would surely agree that the present order is both “passing,” that is, finite and subject to end or change, and “inadequate,” that is, in less than perfect conformity to ethical standards. Given that the standards of Hume’s social and political order were shaped in the context of Christian faith and eschatological hope, it is closer to the truth to say that Hume is the one who is in alienation from these standards. If, as Livingston argues, the present receives its legitimacy from the past, how is it legitimate, on Livingston’s own grounds, for Hume to critique the legitimate Christian moral order? It can appear so only given a sharp distinction between artificial and natural lives, a distinction that has dissolved upon closer examination. Once the bright lines between artificial and natural lives—those between providential and Humean history—begin to fade, we—and Hume—are left with a more complex picture and a more differentiated critical task.
History as Rhetoric
Livingston rightly notes that “the providential view of history provides an a priori framework for interpreting historical events.”38 How does this differ from a Humean view of history? Hume often uses the term “true” when speaking of history. History, as we have seen, places objects in their “true point of view” (E 568), it perceives historical actors “in their true colours” (E 566), and historians are “true friends of virtue” (E 567). Nevertheless, while history is not written from some merely relative point of view, neither is it written into the objective structure of the world. Rather, the historical point of view is, in Livingston’s words, the “point of view written into the very idea of history.”39 Once the distinction between natural and artificial lives is dismantled, along with the notion that providential history is a single discrete understanding of history that can be clearly opposed to Hume’s own truly historical understanding, we are left with competing a priori frameworks for interpreting historical events, written into different ideas of history, and constitutive of different forms of community. These can be seen as in partial conformity with the standards that constitute the present social order, and in partial alienation from these standards. A wholly artificial form of life would be self-defeating and unable to sustain itself, just as an utterly alienated historical perspective would be unrecognizable as a historical perspective.40 But anything short of this extreme is neither unintelligible nor illegitimate as a historical perspective.
This is not to deny that Hume is able to offer a critique of various forms of providential history, showing the historical accounts they offer to be wrong or blameworthy. But it is to insist that these must be engaged with substantively and piecemeal, rather than being dismissed a priori on formal grounds. Confronted with accounts of history shaped by Christian eschatology, it is obviously not sufficient to point out that these are alienated from the point of view Hume endorses, nor that Hume is alienated from the point of view endorsed therein. Rather, in critiquing the dominant conventions of his day, Hume must appeal to standards that are present or at least implicit within the society, and point out how they stand in tension with or contradict other commitments. And he must then persuade his readers to retain some of these while dropping incompatible commitments. Because common life is in fact pervaded by contradictions of various kinds, there will always be room for this kind of internal criticism, which preserves us from an immobile conservatism. But since logic by itself cannot determine which of two incompatible commitments should be dropped, criticism is always
