contributors to this volume fill in essential parts of the context in which Hume’s historical thought developed or flesh out the reception his historical writings received. Others still tease out the historical features of Hume’s more seemingly philosophical writings, his Treatise of Human Nature, and his later recasting of that work in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). In short, it is not just that it is wrongheaded to pigeonhole Hume as “philosopher” at one point in his literary career and as “historian” at another; history and philosophy are commensurate in Hume’s thought and works from the beginning to the end. Only by recognizing this can we begin to make sense of Hume’s canon as a whole. Only then are we able to see clearly his many contributions to fields we now recognize as the distinct disciplines of history, philosophy, political science, economics, literature, religious studies, and much else besides.
In chapter 1, “Hume and Ecclesiastical History: Aims and Contexts,” Roger L. Emerson asks why Hume “might have wanted to write an ecclesiastical history and what sort of a history he would have written had he done one.” Starting with the surviving textual evidence, Emerson establishes Hume’s interest in the topic of ecclesiastical history and, drawing on a plethora of printed and manuscript sources, situates Hume’s aims in the contexts of his own life, the Scottish Enlightenment, and larger trends in European history. Emerson notes that “to write ecclesiastical history as Hume had seen it in The History of England would be to destroy the field in the interests of more enlightened ways of thinking.” Moreover, that was where “lasting fame and more money” were to be found and perhaps where “some contribution to what he called at the end of this life ‘the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition’” might be made. Hume would have been tempted by all of this. Emerson fleshes out Hume’s Scottish context with extended accounts of Patrick Cuming, Charles Mackie, and William Rouet, among others whom Emerson knows well but who are not often referred to in the Hume literature, as vast as it is. By 1720, long before Hume turned his critical gaze in that direction, practitioners found it increasingly “difficult to see ecclesiastical history in the blinkered way that had previously prevailed.” But Hume’s ecclesiastical history, had he written one, may not have been the sort that enlightened contemporaries such as Voltaire and other philosophes wanted Hume to write. After all, Hume the historian always “sought to play a moderating and evenhanded role.” So when Hume “said he did not want to write an ecclesiastical history because he prized his peace, he may not have been referring only to attacks by the orthodox.” Emerson concludes that the “peace [Hume] was loath to forego” toward the close of his life “would have been disturbed by Catholics and Protestants but also by infidels and philosophes who wanted to écraser l’infâme” in a way that was not Hume’s.
Chapter 2 is also concerned with the intersection between Hume’s historical thought and his religious concerns. In “Artificial Lives, Providential History, and the Apparent Limits of Sympathetic Understanding,” Jennifer A. Herdt considers Hume as “a proponent of a hermeneutic philosophy of history,” maintaining that Hume considered religious lives a breed apart. Moreover, it “remains the case in contemporary historiography that religion is often subjected to reductionistic analysis in scholarship otherwise devoted to the task of understanding people on their own terms.” Herdt provides a historiographical overview, giving attention to seminal works by David Fate Norton and Richard Popkin, and especially Donald W. Livingston, whose account of Hume’s limits of moral explanation she challenges head on. With reference to the Essays but also the Treatise and “A Dialogue,” which was appended to Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Herdt pieces together Hume’s historical perspective, seeing clearly what many twentieth-century commentators did not, that “Hume was optimistic about the possibility of achieving sympathetic understanding of foreign points of view, and insistent that this understanding did not imply moral relativism.” The key for Hume in understanding any historical situation was what Herdt here and elsewhere helpfully names “thicker description.” Hume saw “a limit to the scope of sympathetic understanding” because such a perspective was “possible only where people are governed by ‘maxims of common life and ordinary conduct’; not where they live artificial lives, governed by speculative beliefs that contradict the maxims of ordinary life.” Drawing on a key passage in the second Enquiry—one that figures in important ways in other chapters in this collection—where Hume derides monkish virtues, Herdt argues that Hume does not succeed “in drawing a sharp boundary between natural and artificial lives, maxims, and practices.” Rather, he “illegitimately excuses himself from the task of sympathetic understanding by suggesting that lives dedicated to the pursuit of ends that do not conform to his own substantive understanding of what is truly ‘useful’ or ‘agreeable’ are in fact pursuing no goods at all and undermine the conditions of the possibility of human life and flourishing.” She hints—with a nod to Hume’s method of “thick description”—that a fuller appreciation of the providential histories available to eighteenth-century thinkers will show “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.” “If religious belief is utterly incoherent and religious lives utterly self-defeating, sympathetic understanding is inherently impossible,” Herdt writes; “so why attempt it at all?” In her critical reading, Hume did not show “that in theistic convictions or monkish virtues sympathetic understanding comes up against its limits.” This she finds unfortunate, for “the historian’s first task”—whether in the eighteenth century or now—“remains that of seeking sympathetic understanding.”
Emerson and Herdt both complicate our understanding of Hume’s historical approach to religious topics; and so too does Philip Hicks, in his chapter, “‘The Spirit of Liberty’: Historical Causation and Political Rhetoric in the Age of Hume.” Hicks writes that “one of Hume’s goals was to write an utterly secular account of the English past,” but using the phrase “the spirit of liberty” was ironic, as it “actually made it resemble providence to a startling degree.” What is up here? Before turning to Hume’s text for an answer, Hicks traces the history of the phrase as employed by Machiavelli and others, and especially as it was used by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and, following him, James Thomson. Hicks reminds us that “Hume first cut his teeth as a political thinker observing the titanic struggle between Bolingbroke and Walpole,” and in his political essays and then in the History of England, Hume distilled the British civil wars down to a battle between Charles I and “the spirit of liberty.” Reading Hume’s History as a unified whole in the light cast by his Essays, Hicks shows Hume to be a master of historical summary. The Essays also give us a better context for understanding the close relationship between “liberty” and “enthusiasm” in Hume’s historical narrative. Quoting an important passage from the History in which Hume had argued that the spirit of enthusiasm “strongly disposed [the Puritans’] minds to adopt republican tenets; and inclined them to arrogate, in their actions and conduct, the same liberty, which they assumed, in their rapturous flights and ecstasies,” Hicks rightly sees that for Hume, “the spirit of enthusiasm and the spirit of liberty more or less worked in tandem, mutually reinforcing one another’s influence.” Thus, “the overall effect of using this bare phrase in the way Hume did was to minimize or ignore liberty’s religious connotations and play up its positive, civic qualities.” Hicks began with the historical use of the phrase “the spirit of liberty” before Hume, and he concludes by investigating the phrase in writings after Hume, including writings by British authors such as John Brown, William Robertson, and Catharine Macaulay. Tracing the phrase to American shores, Hicks teases out its meaning for American revolutionaries such as John and Abigail Adams, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Mercy Otis Warren, thereby masterfully illuminating Hume’s place in connecting the “revolutionary politics” of the seventeenth century with that of the eighteenth century.
Several other chapters in this volume also contribute to our understanding of Hume by elucidating the different contexts in which Hume wrote and was read. In
