David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution

Foreword

Prophet i-xxii.indd 7 3/2/12 10:27 PM FOREWORD .. I Philosophers rarely write history, and David Hume (171 1-76) is unique in being recognized as one who made canonical contributions to both philosophy and history. Many think ofHume as a philosopher but in his own time he was known as an essayist and author of the six-volume History ofEngland (1754-62). The History was a classic in his lifetime and went through at least 167 posthumous editions. It was the standard work on the subject for nearly a century, until Thomas Babington Macaulay's History ofEngland began to challenge it in 1849. Even so, Hume's work was published-iffinally only in an abridged form-continually into the twentieth century. Some editions issued in printings of Ioo,ooo. The young Winston Churchill learned English history from one of these abridgements known as "the student's Hume." The most substantial part of the History is Hume's account of the reign of the Stuarts, which included the English Civil War, the trial and execution ofCharles I, and the establishment of a Puritan republic under Oliver Cromwell. The claim that the people had the legal authority to put to trial and to execute their sovereign shocked seventeenth-century Europe and cast a shadow far into the eighteenth century. Hume's account of these events quickly became the most forceful and memorable. But the influence of the History was not confined to the Englishspeaking world. Laurence Bongie demonstrates that during the events leading up to the French Revolution and for a considerable time thereafter , Hume's account of the English Civil War was used by the French to make sense of the terrible events through which they were living. Hume had interpreted the revolution in England that led to the execution of Charles I and a Puritan republic under the military government of Cromwell as an intellectual and spiritual pathology mingled with ambition . What the Puritans eventually sought was not reform but a total transformation of the social and political order in accord with a religious ideology. Hume's narrative seemed isomorphic to what was happening in France. The goal of the French Revolution was not reform but a root and branch transformation of society. The Jacobins stood for the Puritans , and the Jacobins' self-evident truths of the rights of man stood for vii Prophet i-xxii.indd 8 3/2/12 10:27 PM FOREWORD the self-certifying enthusiasms and revelations of the Puritans; Louis XVI was Charles I, and Napoleon was Cromwell. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in ~France is commonly viewed as the origin of the modern conservative intellectual tradition, because he deemed the French Revolution to be an event unique to modern times: not at all an effort at reform but the hubristic attempt to transform the whole of society in accord with an ideology. But Hume before Burke had attached essentially this interpretation to the Puritan revolution in England. Additionally, if the intellectual core of conservatism is a critique of ideology in politics, then Hume's History-not Burke's Reflections-would appear to be the primal source of modern conservatism . Laurence Bongie, in David Hume: Prophet ofthe Counter-revolution, gives us good reason to think this was true of French conservative thought. Therefore, one mightwell wonder whether much ofwhat Burke perceived in the French Revolution as a spiritual disorder was what Hume's account of the Puritan revolution had prepared him to see. Thomas Jefferson considered Hume's History such a formidable force that he banned it from the University of Virginia. Of the work he wrote to William Duane on August 12, 181o, that it "has spread universal toryism over the land." Six years later, on November 25, 1816,Jefferson wrote of Hume's work to John Adams that, "This single book has done more to sap the free principles of the English Constitution than the largest standing army.. .."Jefferson preferred John Baxter's A New and Impartial History ofEngland (1796), which was a reworking ofHume's History from the Whig perspective and which Jefferson called "Hume's history republicanized." WhatJefferson did not know (because he had not read the letters of the last decade of Hume's life) was that Hume supported complete independence for the American colonies as early as 1768 and-to the astonishment of his friends-held to that position until his death on August 25, 1776, five days after the complete text of...