to Hume’s History for its story of liberty. We are better served to think of it as “A Study of Authority,” with a prominent part being played by Elizabeth I, “Hume’s heroine.” When we approach the History from this perspective and in its entirety rather than piecemeal, seemingly troublesome passages fall into place. For instance, the “four appendices are like slides in a magic lantern,” each offering a stock-taking “of the functioning of authority in English history at certain moments in time.” We also see that although Hume “earned his reputation as a Tory historian because of his defense of Charles I,” like the other Stuarts, Charles did not have “the prudence and the skill to ensure stability,” and that is what led to 1688, “the end of history” for the English. These themes van Holthoon traces through Hume’s political and economic essays, showing that as a historical thinker and writer, “Hume had a remarkable unity of purpose,” and this is partly why “his History has stood the test of time.”
Both van Holthoon and Suderman emphasize the importance of historical context in Hume’s scheme of historical judgment. In chapter 8, the late Claudia M. Schmidt has added to that developing image in her broad-ranging considerations in “David Hume as a Philosopher of History.” Providing a survey of the origins and development of the “philosophy of history,” Schmidt argues this historiography lends itself to a “twofold typology” aligned with “two divergent conceptions of philosophy in general: the ‘speculative’ or ‘substantive’ and the ‘analytic’ or ‘critical.’” Schmidt recommends a third possibility, one that comes out of her reading of Emil Falkenheim and David Carr and which she describes as the “existential philosophy of history,” an “approach to the philosophical study of history and human nature that examines the influence of historical existence on human consciousness.” Viewing Hume’s corpus in light of these three divisions, Schmidt finds that “a sequence of seemingly disparate passages” might advantageously be linked to reveal Hume’s coherent philosophy of history. A speculative and analytic philosopher of history, Schmidt’s Hume offers “a tentative theory . . . of progress” and recommends a causal understanding of human actions and historical testimony. But Schmidt also argues that Hume’s existential philosophy of history “is an underlying principle in his philosophical system.” Here she emphasizes Hume’s attentiveness to historical context, a theme others touch on to good effect in this volume as well. Hume presents to his readers “an account of the influence of historical existence over human consciousness, which directs us to consider the historical context of human thought, emotion, and action.” In a final section, Schmidt traces Hume’s subsequent impact as a philosopher of history in the works of Auguste Comte, Hegel, John Herschel, J. S. Mill, Carl Hempel, Johann Gottfried Herder, and J. G. Hamann, among others.
Several of the contributors to this volume, including Schmidt, note that there are interesting links to be worked out between Hume’s comments on aesthetics and his study of history. Timothy M. Costelloe takes up part of that challenge in chapter 9, “Fact and Fiction: Memory and Imagination in Hume’s Approach to History and Literature.” Noting that Hume both “juxtaposes” and “compares” what he artfully refers to as “the craft of the historian to the art of the poet,” Costelloe investigates further to see what this reveals about Hume’s understanding of the rules for literary and historical composition. Starting with the poet and drawing heavily on Hume’s sections on memory and imagination in book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature, Costelloe shows how for Hume there are “three general rules of criticism that are tantamount to techniques, which if followed can guide the creation of successful poetry, and if ignored would produce the opposite.” Turning with that knowledge to Hume as historian, Costelloe argues that for Hume “history is a true copy, a veridical depiction, in contrast to the speculation of narratives that from error, fancy, or dogmatism, depart from matter of fact.” Or, as he puts it later: “Historians, in short, distinguish fact from fiction, as ideas of memory can be separated from those of imagination; historians discern the real shape of events under the clutter which contemporary reports and time have effectively obscured them.” But that is not to say there is no role for the imagination—far from it. Hume perceives that there is “a chain . . . that leads from the present into remote regions of the past, but the links are images of events and the connections between them dark corners to be illuminated.” Important choices must be made about what facts are to be included in any narrative and how those facts are to be relayed. For Hume, “history still involves manipulating the reader” in an effort “to effect the easy transition of ideas in the imagination.” Costelloe constructs from Hume’s text a number of “rules of historical criticism”: historical accounts must “carry conviction,” have a “plan and design,” and aim to “imitate nature.” Compositions that followed those rules, Hume thought, might live up to history’s essential role as an instructor in morals.
Chapter 10, Douglas Long’s “Hume’s Historiographical Imagination,” shares some ground with Costelloe and Schmidt but recommends an even more central place for the imagination in Hume’s thought and writings. For Hume, says Long, it is “by means of our imagination that we construct the context in which we situate our direct experiences of the world.” In the first part of his essay, Long pursues his theme by looking closely at two important qualities of the imagination: its “sympathetic character” and “constructive power.” In part II, Long differentiates Hume’s thought from that of Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Michel de Montaigne. Bringing Smith’s understanding of sympathy into the mix, Long differentiates Hume’s thought from that of his close friend. This allows us to see more clearly that the History of England “is philosophical history—it is a conventional historical narrative transformed and enlivened by the unprecedented application to historical narrative of Hume’s sympathetic imagination.” Long also maps the “universe of the imagination,” by comparing Hume to Hobbes and Montaigne, two thinkers with whom Hume engaged. In a third section, Long turns to Hume’s discussions of space and time in the Treatise for “insights into the nature and value of the historian’s activities.” He shows that “Hume’s image of a ‘universe of the imagination,’ centered on and bounded by the self, yet paradoxically conveying a vivid sense of the isolation of the self in a vast sea of spatial and temporal phenomena, deserves to be carefully examined as one of the seminal metaphors of modern social, historical, and political thought.” Approaching Hume’s History from this vantage point, Long draws several conclusions, including that the History is “a Herculean attempt to overcome the resistance of historical data to narrative ordering—a sort of fling at cleaning out the Augean stables of historicity.” It is, then, Hume’s effort to map the imagination that so closely links the goals of the Treatise with the History of England and much else that Hume wrote in between. Long reminds us that Hume, in his intriguing essay “Of the Study of History,” tellingly remarked, “we should be for ever children in understanding, were it not for this invention, which extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation.”
In chapter 11, “The ‘Most Curious & Important of All Questions of Erudition’: Hume’s Assessment of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” M. A. Box and Michael Silverthorne turn our attention to Hume’s essay on that topic. This essay—which has received relatively little scholarly attention—has penetrating light to cast on Hume’s dimensions as historian. Box and Silverthorne note at the outset that Hume here seems to have had two goals in mind: “In its curious aspect, the essay is a virtuoso examination of a historical question about comparative populations; in its implications, it is a polemic about police, manners, and constitutions.” Moreover, “the thesis of the curious examination is expressly skeptical, prescribing suspension of judgment. That of the polemic is an endorsement of modernism and a condemnation of the ancients’ ways.” Box and Silverthorne provide a schematic outline of “Hume’s Skeptical Argument,” whereby Hume
