the titanic struggle between Bolingbroke and Walpole. His earliest political essays criticized Bolingbroke’s violent partisanship and basic premise that under Walpole, crown patronage had endangered the constitution. Nonetheless, Hume co-opted Bolingbroke’s virulent language to help him conceptualize the English past. In his essay “Of the Parties of Great Britain” (1741), to compress into a few sentences the essential dynamic of the British civil wars, Hume imagined two entities that each “arose” and then collided: “an ambitious, or rather a misguided, prince” (King Charles I) and “the spirit of liberty” (E 68). Thirteen years later, Hume would adopt the same terminology to carry out his full-scale treatment of the same subject in The History of England. As early as 1741, then, writing in the waning days of Walpole’s regime, Hume had already picked up this phrase and used it in the manner of Bolingbroke.16 This usage, coming seven years before the publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), strongly suggests that Hume first encountered the concept in Opposition, not French, discourse. In other words, there was an English genealogy for this particular term from which Hume was drawing that ran back at least as far as Ludlow or Bolingbroke in 1698 and more immediately to the latter’s essays in 1730–31. Montesquieu’s magnum opus used a term translated as “spirit of liberty” (un esprit de liberté) in the two Bolingbrokean senses of an active force in history and a republican political culture. An earlier work, Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Romans’ Greatness and Decline (1734), also employed this term.17 These writings, together with Voltaire’s Essay on Manners (1754–56), accustomed Europeans to speaking in terms of the esprit of nations and helped to invent the genre of philosophical history. Yet, interestingly, the historical thinking that informed Hume’s Essays and History was largely independent of these models.18
Hume’s source for “the spirit of liberty” was a polemical historical commentary in letter form, Bolingbroke’s Remarks, not the French philosophes or the formal histories of England that preceded Hume’s. Those histories by Thomas Carte, William Guthrie, James Ralph, Laurence Echard, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, White Kennett, and the first Earl of Clarendon portrayed events chiefly as the deeds of individual “great” men. Sometimes they discerned larger patterns of causation and highlighted the actions of “the people” or of divine providence. More occasionally, they used the formula “the spirit of” some idea, value, or feeling with which historical actors were imbued—faction, independence, jealousy, and so on.19 In only a handful of instances, however, did they mention “the spirit of liberty.”20 In sum, this “spiritual” form of historical causation was not a common element in English historical writing before Hume made it so.
Hume’s main purpose in adopting the concept of “the spirit of liberty”21 was to explain the political catastrophe of the 1640s. The History expanded on the thesis of his 1741 essay to depict the British civil wars as a showdown between the spirit of liberty and early Stuart monarchy. By Hume’s reckoning, Charles I was tragically overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with this formidable opponent:
Unhappily, his fate threw him into a period, when the precedents of many former reigns favoured strongly of arbitrary power, and the genius of the people ran violently towards liberty. And if his political prudence was not sufficient to extricate him from so perilous a situation, he may be excused. . . . [T]he high idea of his own authority, which he had imbibed, made him incapable of giving way to the spirit of liberty, which began to prevail among his subjects. (H 5:543, 221)
Charles had inherited this political predicament from his father, James, who encountered the nascent spirit of liberty soon after his accession. James’s first parliament “showed more spirit of liberty than appeared among his bishops and theologians” at the Hampton Court Conference, Hume observed (H 5:13). A few pages later, Hume noted that “this watchful spirit of liberty . . . appeared in the commons” to challenge royal judicial authority in the Goodwin electoral case (H 5:17). To account for this newfound spirit, Hume embarked upon one of the History’s famous digressions: “About this period, the minds of men, throughout Europe, especially in England, seem to have undergone a general, but insensible revolution,” Hume wrote. The new learning, improved arts, and increased travel resulted in a “universal fermentation” in which “the ideas of men enlarged themselves on all sides” and “the love of freedom . . . acquired new force” (H 5:18). “This rising spirit” (H 5:19) could just be glimpsed in the previous reign, when one might “observe the faint dawn of the spirit of liberty among the English, the jealousy with which that spirit was repressed by the sovereign, the imperious conduct which was maintained in opposition to it, and the ease with which it was subdued by this arbitrary princess” (H 4:138). Analyzing Elizabethan political life, Hume again pared history down to its bare essentials, pitting the personal skills of a single monarch against the impersonal forces of the spirit of liberty. By contrast with Elizabeth’s masterful response to the challenges presented by this new political reality, James “possessed neither sufficient capacity to perceive the alteration, nor sufficient art and vigour to check it in its early advances” (H 5:19). Although the spirit of liberty drew sustenance from deep-rooted intellectual, economic, and social changes in English society, its triumph over James and Charles was, therefore, by no means inevitable, provided these rulers possessed the political acumen and resolution to repress or accommodate it.
At James’s accession, that spirit animated comparatively few Englishmen, Hume pointed out: “the principles of liberty . . . were, as yet, pretty much unknown to the generality of the people.” Only in the work of “men of genius and of enlarged minds” such as Francis Bacon and Edwin Sandys did a “spirit of liberty” appear (H 5:550). By 1610, however, this growing force had spread, and Hume used it to explain the decisive shift in attitude articulated in the Commons’ remonstrance against James’s new impositions: “A spirit of liberty had now taken possession of the house: The leading members . . . less aspired at maintaining the ancient constitution, than at establishing a new one, and a freer, and a better” (H 5:42). In 1614, the new “house of commons showed rather a stronger spirit of liberty than the foregoing” (H 5:58). By 1626, Hume announced, “the spirit of liberty was universally diffused,” and it accounted for the unprecedented challenge to the crown posed by the Five Knights’ case (H 5:179). In the course of a generation, then, this spirit had spread from a few men to the entire House of Commons, thence to England at large, and finally to Scotland (H 5:257). It approached a saturation point in 1640, when Charles’s attempts to impose forced loans were “repelled by the spirit of liberty, which was now become unconquerable” (H 5:278). So complete was this triumph that in 1642, even the king’s own party “breathed the spirit of liberty,” as its support was conditioned upon his submission to “a legal and limited government” (H 5:394). At this point in the History, the spirit of liberty virtually disappears.22 It had served its two primary functions: registering the comparative extent of opposition to the crown at any given moment and illustrating how a change in intellectual climate precipitated the demise of Stuart monarchy. Because Hume saw the contest for liberty primarily in terms of political processes, not armed struggle, the spirit of liberty appeared in the run-up to the civil wars, but not the battles themselves.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив
