href="#ulink_1669cb4b-c44b-5ee0-b7cc-9f76bed0675c">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have helped to make this book possible. For financial support, I am especially grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Humanities Research Institute at Brock University. At The Pennsylvania State University Press, Sandy Thatcher (now retired) gave the fledgling idea his backing early on. Kendra Boileau, with her assistant Robert Turchick, guided the project through to production, where Laura Reed-Morrisson, Kathleen Kageff, Steve Kress and Patricia Mitchell expertly saw things through to the end. My colleagues and students in the Department of History at Brock University listened with keen interest (not always feigned) and lent their encouragement along the way. Exacting research assistance from Mathieu Robitaille (BA, Brock University, 2009) and Janet Baines (MA, Brock University, 2010) is evident in the bibliography. As always, my greatest supporters are found at home, where Kelly and our two boys, Thomas and William, indulge with such good-natured ease the curious pursuits of their resident historian.
Mark G. Spencer
St. Catharines
In this volume, citations to Hume’s texts are provided parenthetically. Unless stated otherwise, citations give the titles (abbreviated as described in the list below) and page numbers of the edition cited. For example, E 563 refers to page 563 of Miller’s edition of Hume’s Essays. For citations to some of Hume’s texts, however, it is useful to provide more information than the page number of a particular edition. References to Hume’s History take the following form: title, volume, page. Thus, H 2:525 refers to volume 2, page 525, of Todd’s edition of Hume’s History. References to Hume’s Enquiries provide the title, section, and paragraph number of the Beauchamp edition, followed by the page number of the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition, where applicable. For example, EHU 12.4/150 refers to section 12, paragraph 4, in Beauchamp’s edition of the first Enquiry; page 150 in Selby/Nidditch. Similarly, references to Hume’s Treatise provide the title, book, part, section, and paragraph number in the Nortons’ edition, followed by the page number of the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition, so that T 1.3.4.2/82–83 refers to Treatise book 1, part 3, section 4, paragraph 2; pages 82 and 83 in Selby-Bigge/Nidditch.
List of Abbreviations
| E | Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E. F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987). |
| EHU | An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). |
| An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). | |
| EPM | An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). |
| An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). | |
| H | The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, edited by William B. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983). |
| L | The Letters of David Hume, edited by J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). |
| NHR | The Natural History of Religion, in A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). |
| NL | New Letters of David Hume, edited by R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). |
| T | A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). |
| A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). |
David Hume (1711–1776) appreciated the centrality of historical thinking and writing to the enlightened world within which he lived. As the aging scholar put it reflectively in 1770 in a letter to his London publisher, William Strahan, “I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation” (L 2:230). By then, of course, Hume had done much to contribute to that state of affairs in Britain and beyond. All six volumes of his The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754–62) had been published and were circulating far and wide throughout the British Atlantic world. Hume’s History would continue to attract large numbers of readers for the remainder of the author’s lifetime and remained a best seller well into the nineteenth century. Little wonder that the card for Hume in the catalogue of the British Library differentiated him then (as it still does) as “David Hume, the historian.” The records left by the earliest readers of Hume’s History—even its noisiest critics—provide telling evidence of how influential Hume’s account was and also of just how much history mattered to Hume and his contemporaries.
If we want to recapture the essence of Hume’s place in the eighteenth-century history of ideas, then surely his historical thinking and writing ought to inform our understandings to a significant degree. But modern scholars have been far less interested in Hume as historical thinker and writer than were Hume’s contemporaries. It is Hume the philosopher, and especially Hume the philosopher of book 1 of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), whom scholars of Hume and general readers alike now know best. The Treatise—the work that Hume lamented “fell dead-born from the press”—rose to become standard reading in undergraduate philosophy courses around the world, while the History had died a slow death by the early twentieth century, so that now few besides specialists know its contents well. The number of book-length studies on Hume as historian published in the past hundred years are few, and there have been even fewer attempts to consider Hume as historical thinker and writer in a broader sense than as a historian of England. The chapters that follow cannot hope to right this historiographical imbalance, but each is an outstanding contribution toward that end, and together they provide a solid foundation on which future work may build.
The aim, of course, should not be to replace a misguided concentration on only Hume’s philosophical writings with a misguided concentration on only the historical ones. Indeed, each of the chapters in this volume shows that the relationship between Hume’s “historical” works and his “philosophical” works is more intimate than scholars have often assumed. Gone for good are the days when one can offhandedly assert, as R. G. Collingwood once did, that Hume “deserted philosophical studies in favour of historical” ones. Taken together, though, the following chapters offer much greater insight than that.
Casting their individual beams of light on various nooks and crannies of Hume’s historical thought and writing, these chapters illuminate the whole in a way that would not be possible from the perspective of a single-authored study. Their transdisciplinary and international perspectives are complementary, while at the same time they complicate our understanding of Hume’s intentions, texts, and impact. The approaches to Hume in this volume vary, sometimes considerably. A number of chapters offer close readings of themes in Hume’s History of England. Others approach Hume the historical thinker and writer through his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (in which many of the essays have historical leanings or are informed by historical dimensions), through his Natural
