Of Calendars and Graphs: Transformations of the Succession Concept in British Moral Philosophy

Recent accounts of digital critical methods posit that techniques of quantification and visualization have produced a new model of historical relationality. This model purports to shift attention from chronological organization in history (which Pierre Bourdieu referred to as the "model of the calendar") to graphical visualization in which scholars may observe literary or cultural patterns. In this essay, I take the surprising appearance of the term succession in accounts of this new model of relationality as an occasion for examining the conceptual history of the term in the eighteenth century. From the English Civil Wars, to the Revolution of 1688, to the Jacobite uprisings, questions of historical and social continuity prompted British moral philosophers and historians (including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume) to describe forms of order that linked historical and mental processes in terms of succession without relying on outmoded absolutist principles (such as divine right or royal prerogative). These writers produced an abstract succession concept—underwritten by theories of mental succession and association—that facilitated homological links across personal, civil, and natural domains of temporality. Moral philosophers and historians used the language of succession to relate seemingly arbitrary occurrences to natural tendencies of mental ordering, and, in doing so, they grappled with a tension between contingency and determination that has persisted in historiographical discussions of succession, including those raised by innovations in digital media.