Literary Taste as Counter-Enlightenment in Hume's History of England

In David Hume's History of England, cultural achievement plays an ambiguous role in a larger narrative framework meant to demonstrate the nation's gradual progress toward refinement, liberty, and commercial success. Not only does culture, especially literary culture, seem oddly independent of political and economic advancement, it also exposes points where the dichotomies that organize what we understand as Enlightenment history itself—rationality versus irrationality, the modern versus the archaic, the general versus the particular, theory versus anomaly—break down. Hume's literary achievement in the History is to allow his understanding of England's progress to be conditioned by these collapses.