character of explanation and defends the possibility of autonomous social scientific laws even given a naturalist ontology.
12. These are what Livingston terms “moral causal explanations,” Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 191.
13. I have elsewhere placed this aspiration within the context of other contemporary thinkers who shared Hume’s concern with cultivating resources for coping with moral diversity and make no attempt to replicate that discussion here. See Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chaps. 1–2. See also Daniel Carey’s Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 4–5, which depicts these thinkers as likewise “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistence could be located in mankind,” 1.
14. In fact, though, Hume’s account of theism is perhaps most persuasive as an account of certain very particular forms of religious life, notably the one in which he grew up, a strict form of Scottish Calvinism. Even here, it can be argued that Hume’s account is simply blind to the theological nuances that render the stance internally coherent—although he might counter that most uneducated Scots would not themselves have grasped the nuances.
15. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 340.
16. See also his account of Cardinal Pole (H 3:430).
17. For a fuller discussion of the place of the History of England in Hume’s account of the limits of sympathetic understanding, see Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy, chap. 5.
18. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 240. Livingston is also concerned with the topic of barbarism in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, but here his focus is on how civilizations can fall back into a kind of “barbarism of refinement,” 217–19.
19. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 245–46.
20. Popkin, “Skepticism and the Study of History,” in David Hume: Philosophical Historian, ed. David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxx–xxxi.
21. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 193. According to Livingston, Hume’s critique leaves room for a form of philosophical theism, essentially amounting to a regulative belief about nature as an ordered whole that serves to guide inquiry, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 63–66. This is a suggestive interpretation, but one that requires a strong reading of Hume’s texts; I do not engage with it here.
22. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 234.
23. Ibid., 234.
24. Ibid., 234–35.
25. Ibid., 235.
26. Ibid., 300.
27. Ibid., 143.
28. Ibid., 301.
29. Ibid., 301.
30. Ibid., 301.
31. On early modern European society (including, e.g., Calvinist ideals of the advancement of the kingdom of God) as dominated not by an idea of progress but by the notion of a return to a golden age in the past, see J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 98–101.
32. See George Marsden’s account of Jonathan Edwards’s “millennial optimism,” in contrast with opposing contemporary views, in Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 333–40.
33. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 215.
34. Noel Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, vol. 1, ed. Christopher John Murray (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 504.
35. This is apparent in Livingston’s characterization of Hume’s true philosophical theism: “this metaphysical belief about the world as a whole, that it is ordered by ‘some consistent plan’ and reveals ‘one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible,’ in turn guides scientific activity in its research within the world,” Philosophical Melancholy, 66.
36. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 285.
37. Ibid., 286, 291.
38. Ibid., 288.
39. Ibid., 234.
40. The reasons for this have been given classic formulation by Donald Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 5–20.
41. Annette Baier argues that the test of reflexive self-survey is all Hume needs in order to justify the virtues he champions over against others; A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 215–17. Lottenbach, though, points out that most rivals to Hume’s position are not actually self-defeating, and are in fact capable of reflexive self-approval. He sees little to distinguish reflexive self-approval from “complacent self-congratulation,” “Monkish Virtues, Artificial Lives,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 3 (1996): 387. It is important to recognize both the power and the limits of this sort of internal criticism; it is inherently one part logic and one part rhetoric.
42. This is not to say, of course, that Enlightenment historiography won the day. Indeed, while Hume’s History of England undeniably established his reputation as an author, it was not in its own day received as impartial. In the next generation, Romantic historiographers critiqued Hume for a general failure of empathy with his subjects, not simply those dominated by religious convictions; Hume’s approach was seen as too abstract, too detached. The Romantic ideal was itself to be displaced by nineteenth-century philosophical historians who likewise dismissed Hume, now for lacking insight into the structural forces driving historical change. See Mark Salber Phillips and Dale R. Smith, “Canonization and Critique: Hume’s Reputation as a Historian,” in The Reception of David Hume in Europe, ed. Peter Jones (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 312–13.
43. Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” 504; Catherine Bell, “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 33; Alister Chapman, “Intellectual History and Religion in Modern Britain,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 232.
44. Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 138; emphasis in original.
45. Ibid., 138.
46. Ibid., 144.
“THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY”: HISTORICAL CAUSATION AND POLITICAL RHETORIC IN THE AGE OF HUME
In his History of England (1754–62), David Hume routinely
