1. It was a commonplace of Enlightenment culture that genuine historical writing must always amount to a reconstruction of causal relationships. To remain in a Scottish context, Adam Smith maintained that "the design of historical writing is not merely to entertain (…) besides that it has in view to instruct the reader. It sets before us the more interesting and important events of human life, points out the causes by which those events were brought about and by this means points out to us by what manner and method we may produce a similar good effect or avoid similar bad ones". Smith believed that explaining causal relationships was a fundamental task of historiography, as "we are not satisfied" if a fact is told us "which we are at a loss to conceive what it was that brought it about"(1). And Lord Kames added: "the perfection of historical composition (…) is a relation of interesting facts connected with their motives and consequences. A history of that kind is truly a chain of causes and effects"(2).
It is therefore not surprising to learn that Hume did not escape this conception of historical writing. He did not believe that the historical process has a merely mechanical nature. Rather, causal reasoning could overcome what Hume saw as the narrow and merely erudite knowledge of the antiquarians. It meant selecting the events worth being narrated, understanding their inner dynamics and presenting it in adequate literary form.
Hume’s name is linked to a very influential critique of the principle of causality, but in the History of England he dealt with the problem in an altogether different way from what he did in the Treatise of Human Nature: that is why in the present essay I am not trying to establish a connection between these two different conceptual domains. It goes without saying that certain guide-lines of the Treatise’s treatment of causality persisted throughout Hume’s entire philosophical and literary career, and can therefore be found in the History as well. An emphasis on causal links seen as habit-driven beliefs (the core of the celebrated doctrine set forth in the Treatise of Human Nature) can be found in Hume’s historiographical activity as well. Such links are of a subjective, and at the same time reliable nature. Let us consider a page of the Treatise, where Hume discussed what we may call the origin of the sort of ideas that subsequently enter books of history:
I form an idea of Rome, which I neither see nor remember; but which is connected with such impressions as I remember to have received from the conversations and books of travellers and historians. This idea of Rome I place in a certain situation on the idea of an object, which I call the globe. I join to it the conception of a particular government, and religion, and manners. I look backward to consider its first foundation; its several revolutions, successes, and misfortunes. All this, and every thing else, which I believe, are nothing but ideas; tho’ by their force and settled order, arising from custom and the relation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the other ideas, which are merely the offspring of the imagination (THN, 108).
This page is very revealing about what historical writing meant to Hume. First of all, we learn that it is originated within a culture (as it derives from the "conversation and books of travellers and historians"). Secondly, history takes the shape of a field characterised by manifold relationships: between Rome and the globe; between politics, religion and manners; between rises and declines; and finally, between the idea conceived by the historian and what he has learnt in the writings of other authors. The ideas that we acquire about history (here distinguished by mere past), are "nothing but ideas". However, their very connection ("arising from … the relation of cause and effect"), combined with the continuity of witnesses, render them reliable and different from the "offspring of the imagination".
What is revealing of this page is the clear statement of a principle capable of liberating historical writing from the grip of historical pyrrhonism. It is usually believed that Hume solved the problem of source reliability through his sophisticated theory of witnessing set forth in the essay on miracles(3). If we keep to his historiography, however, and if we do not take into account the certainly crucial issue of miracles and witnesses of ancient history, we can notice how Hume’s solution to the puzzle of the reliability of historical knowledge lay in acknowledging a "rhetorical" nature of the historiographical enterprise. Historical ideas are "nothing but ideas", and they are sisters, although more reliable, to the ideas of imagination: but the habit engendered by cultural continuity and the causal relationships contrived by the intellect and interwoven in the historical narrative ensure the plausibility of historical discourse. In this essay I will therefore deal with the "settled order" that Hume gave to the History of England and with the role played there by the issue of cause and effect. I am less interested in the epistemological side of the question than in its civil meaning: Hume’s analysis of the causes of early-modern English history tells an important story about his attitude towards fundamental issues such as the civil wars and the rise of a commercial society.
2. If we examine the vocabulary of causes used by Hume we realise that it is not different from the one generally used by other Enlightenment authors(4). In the first place, as early as in the essay Of national characters of 1748, Hume, following on the footsteps of Montesquieu, introduced a distinction between physical and natural, and moral and political causes. Physical causes were defined by Hume as "those qualities of the air, and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone of the body and giving a particular complexion, which, though reflection and reason may sometimes overcome it, will yet prevail among the generality of mankind, and have an influence on their manners"(5). Moral causes, on the other hand, were defined as "all circumstances which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us". Hume mentioned "the nature of government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours" as examples of moral causes(6).
In this essay Hume gave nine reasons to explain the primacy of moral and political over natural causes. In the History of England such a primacy becomes crucial and is connected to Hume’s emphasis on the study of manners.
Hume never wholly abandoned an interest for political history. In the Treatise of Human Nature ha maintained that "the histories of kingdoms are more interesting than domestic histories: The histories of great empires more than those of small cities and principalities: And the histories of wars and revolutions more than those of peace and order" (THN, 613). This appeal to a conventional and neoclassical conception of historical writing was however soon combined with an outstanding attitude for the study of manners. In the essay Of the study of history where commerce, though, was never mentioned, Hume showed that what was of interest in history was the chance to observe the progress of arts and sciences, and the interplay of "policy of government" and "civility of conversation" (EMPL, 565-66): a perspective on the history of manners was thus opened up. By the time the History of England was planned and composed, the role played by manners, and by economic factors within them, had become primary. At the conclusion of the reign of James I Hume put an appendix, the first of its kind, where the chronological account was interrupted "to take a survey of the state of the kingdom, with regard to government, manners, finances, arms, trade, learning": the principle underlying this investigation being that, "where a just notion is not formed of these particulars, history can be little instructive, and often will not be intelligible"(7) (HE, V.124). Setting about writing a "general survey of the age [of the Restoration in 1660], so far as regards manners, finances, arms, commerce, arts and sciences" he observed that "the chief use of history is, that it affords materials for disquisitions of this nature" (HE, VI.140). In a review written in 1773 but never published, Hume restated that "the history of commerce, shipping, and coin is (...) a subject of infinite momentum to a trading nation"(8). Seemingly, trivial economic details could help draw revealing consequences concerning the "domestic economy" and the "manner of life" of past ages (HE, II.180). More generally, Hume believed that, "even trivial circumstances, which show the manners of the age, are often more instructive, as well as entertaining, than the great transactions of wars and negotiations, which are nearly similar in all periods and in all countries of the world" (HE, IV.44). Relating a private conversation between James VI and I and Buckingham, "related by Cottington to lord Clarendon", he said that he was relating some facts which, "though minute, are not undeserving of a place in history" (HE, V.106).
In the field of manners a crucial role was played by commerce and its social and cultural consequences. Hume often emphasized the novelty, as well as the rarity, of the study of political economy. Although "nothing can be of more use than to improve, by practice, the method of reasoning on these subjects, which of all others are the most important", nonetheless "they are commonly treated in the loosest and most careless manner"(9). Consequently, the modern art of government had become much more complicated, because it ought to take on board an economic policy: "the more simple ideas of order and equity are sufficient to guide a legislator in every thing that regards the internal administration of justice: but the principles of commerce are much more complicated, and require long experience and deep reflection to be well understood in any state" (HE, III.74). The principles of commerce were not only difficult for the economists or the rulers, but also for the historians who should comment on them. Hume firmly believed that economical and commercial matters were crucial for any proper historical knowledge. This had a twofold meaning, linked to the eighteenth-century ambivalence of the very term "commerce". On one hand, the history of commercial institutions was relevant to an understanding of a Country’s economic development in terms of the balance of trade. On the other, in a much wider sense than the mere analysis of riches, the study of commerce coincided with the reconstruction of the civilizing process undergone by those societies to which it gave their name. In this latter meaning, the enquiry concerning economic factors was inserted in a more general investigation concerning the manners of a society at a given time.
3. The historical study of commerce and manners posed remarkable methodological problems. Ancient historiography could not be of any help to Hume, in so far as "trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century; and there scarcely is any ancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it"(10) (Of civil liberty, 88). Hume did not intend to repudiate the legacy of ancient political history (he once wrote that "the first page of Thucydides is (...) the commencement of real history"(11), but he believed that it was necessary to integrate their account of wars and political events with a more wide-ranging view of the development of manners: "the rise, progress, perfection, and decline of art and science, are curious objects of contemplation, and intimately connected with a narration of civil transactions" (HE, II.519).
Arnaldo Momigliano has observed that in the eighteenth-century history of manners, "what used to be secondary becomes primary; What used to be primary — wars and dynasties — becomes secondary"(12). Hume’s troubled relationship with ancient historiography is certainly a case in point of such a transformation. But it was not easy to find models of significance among the moderns either, for "even the italians have kept a profound silence with regard to it" (Of civil liberty, 88). Hume had precociously wondered that "there is not a Word of Trade in all Matchiavel, which is strange considering that Florence rose only by Trade"(13). If we take into account the partiality that Hume ascribed to the greatest part of modern historians — a phenomenon particularly evident among the whigs (HE, VI.532-33) —, it is not surprising that he did not find such a delicate and complex subject adequately dealt with in any modern historical work. Montesquieu was an exception, as he had devoted book XXI of his masterpiece to the relationships between laws and commerce "considéré dans les révolutions qu'il a eues dans le monde". But this insights had not been shaped in a veritable historiography, so that they could not be a point of reference for the problems of narrative construction posed by commerce in the History of England. Erudite histories of commercial institutions like John Cary’s, moreover, were of little relevance to Hume because they limited themselves to a compilation of documents without shaping a history of the natural development of commercial society.
It is true that antiquarian research had anticipated historiography in the analysis of manners. The numismatic investigation had for instance helped to reveal hitherto neglected aspects of the economic life of past societies. Despite this fact, the work of antiquarians, as Momigliano has shown, was necessarily alternative to the chronological arrangement of arguments that is ascribed to historiography(14).
Let us open a work which enjoyed a certain popularity in the second half of the eighteenth century, Adam Anderson’s An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, published in 1764. Although it appeared after Hume’s History of England, it is useful to notice that it represented a radically different way of conceiving the history of commerce. Anderson produced an antiquarian history, gathering information and arranging it in an annalistic way (squeezing the development of commerce in a periodization century by century). It seems fair to say that this work never achieved a thorough interpretation of the causes of the rise of commercial society. There are certainly some clever insights about certain crucial historical developments (derived, among other things, from a reading of Hume?): Anderson emphasises the role of towns, Crusades and the invention of compass in the growth of commerce. In the context of his discussion of Henry VIII he maintains that the king promoted commerce through his legislation against large aristocratic entails. Of the Reformation and the apology for freedom of conscience which it gave rise to, he said that it was "greatly beneficial to Commerce"(15). But Anderson’s work, if compared to Hume’s or Robertson’s, seems confined, substantially and formally, to a more backward method of treating economic questions in their historical dimension.
I am not implying that there has been a "progress" in the eighteenth-century histories of commerce. What we must learn is that, by the middle of the eighteenth-century, at least in Britain, there were two ways of writing a history of commerce. On one hand there was an "antiquarian" history of commerce, inspired to Huet and Cary, and represented by Anderson among others, while on the other hand emerged a "philosophical" history of commerce, an attempt to grasp the causes of the development of commercial society on the grounds of natural jurisprudence and to shape a history of civil society where political and social aspects could be seen in their mutual relationships. Hume lay at the outset of this process, quite far from its achievement, but the role of moral causes in his historiography becomes clear precisely in this context.
4. Hume’s interest in causes was always bound to his attempt of grasping the rationale of the development of English, Anglo-Scottish and British civil society. The History of England is accordingly based on a variety of causal layers.
Let us think to the outbreak of the civil war. It is clear that Hume displayed a multilayered causal model to understand the origins of the mid seventeenth-century political conflict: there follows a manifold periodisation, a story visualised at various levels, following complementary but distinct chronologies(16).
The civil war must be explained with reference to long-term social and economic causes shaping a history of manners. Given the crucial role played in the events of 1642-49 by the parliamentarians of the House of Commons, the members of the new class of landlords, law professions and mercantile ranks, the roots of such a conflict must be found in the demise of feudal property and break-up of baronial social power which marked the rise of the commons as a social class. The royal policy aimed at the strengthening of sovereignty caused a fragmentation of feudal property and a different distribution of landed property, hence the gradual rise in the power of the Commons (HE, II.57). Such a transformation took place in three phases. In the late Middle Ages the monarchy favoured the establishment of a new nobility more loyal to the Crown, which undermined the influence of the old baronial aristocracy. Henry VII legislation’s against the rents of the nobles was a further element in the destabilising of baronial power. The dissolution of the monasteries achieved by Henry VIII fulfilled eventually the conditions for the growth of a new class of landed proprietors by making available large quantities of land (HE, III.195, 203, 227-30).
In combining the strengthening of Tudor monarchy, the crisis of feudal nobility and the origins of the gentry, Hume seemed to be resuming to the historical paradigm created by Bacon and Harrington. In the History of the Reign of Henry VII (1622) Bacon emphasized the importance of the legislation of the first Tudor monarch for the decline of the military power of the aristocracy. That was clear with reference to the royal policy concerning the enclosures. Henry VII enacted a law whereby all farms with at least twenty acres of lands were to be constantly kept in good conditions. Thereby it became necessary that they were inhabited, not by a class of cottagers, but by a class of farmers-proprietors, intermediate between nobles and farmers, and capable of sustaining domestics and servants and till the land. The origin of such a middle rank had repercussions on the organisation of the feudal militia, as these new landlords, free of bonds towards their masters, could not be compelled to pay a military service.
5. Harrington agreed with Bacon and emphasised the crucial role played by Henry VII in terminating the "wrestling match" between king and nobles in the feudal constitution. Henry VII promoted the dissolution of the post-Conquest monarchy and achieved a decisive transformation in the distribution of property, hence in the organisation of the militia. In Harrington’s peculiar historical interpretation the equality in property achieved through the rise of the commons showed the inadequacy of the monarchy and paved the way to the establishment of a commonwealth(17).
A rather interesting difference between Hume and his forerunners is his lack of interest in the issue of the military power connected to the distribution of landed property: in Harrington "civil history of property" and "civil history of the sword" constituted two strictly connected aspects(18). The History of England can not on the contrary be regarded as a history of the relationship between arms and land. Moreover, Hume did not refer the historical change of property exclusively to the legislation of Henry VII:
whatever may be commonly imagined, from the authority of lord Bacon, and from that of Harrington, and later authors, the laws of Henry VII. contributed very little towards the great revolution, which happened about this period in the English constitution. (...) The change of manners was the chief cause of the secret revolution of government, and subverted the power of the barons(19) (HE, IV.384-85).
Although he did not renounced referring to a "constant scheme of policy" implemented by Henry VII and aiming at undermining the power of the barons and strengthening that of those members of the clergy, lawyers and new nobles which were more loyal to the king (HE, III.77), Hume was mainly interested in the unprecedented availability of luxury goods that determined a change in the manners of the nobles:
the nobility, instead of vying with each other, in the number and boldness of their retainers, acquired by degrees a more civilized species of emulation, and endeavoured to excel in the splendour and elegance of their equipage, houses, and tables. The common people, no longer maintained in vicious idleness by their superiors, were obliged to learn some calling or industry, and became useful both to themselves and to others. And it must be acknowledged, in spite of those who declaim so violently against refinement in the arts, or what they are pleased to call luxury, that, as much as an industrious tradesman is a better man and a better citizen than one of those idle retainers, who formerly depended on the great families; so much is the life of a modern nobleman more laudable than that of an ancient baron (HE, III.76-77).
Harrington referred to such a change saying that the nobles, from princes, had turned courters, "where their revenues, never to have been exhausted by beef and mutton, where found narrow"(20). It is the same process of discovery of luxury and baronial borrowing subsequently described by Fletcher and Defoe in the context of the late seventeenth-century controversy over standing armies(21). According to Fletcher, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the frugal and military way of life on which the feudal system was founded gave way to a discovery of pleasures and luxury, marketed by the Italian merchants and imported from Asia and America. The barons fell prey of such expenses and were compelled to borrow heavily. Compelled to sell or alienate otherwise their lands, the barons lost their previous authority over their vassals, who were no longer compelled to pay a military service as it was the case in the feudal era. Such an "alteration in the way of living" transferred the power of the sword from the subjects to the sovereign, when the kings began to hire foreign a mercenary troops. For Fletcher such a transition coincided with a moral and political corruption which sank Europe "into an abyss of pleasures" and gave a fatal blow to the Gothic limited monarchies(22).
Defoe reconstructed a similar process, but with a contrary interpretation. The luxury spread at the beginning of the modern era was instrumental in ending the "Tyranny of the Barons" and marked the beginning of the wealth of the "Common People". The Gothic model was from being an example of balance: rather, it was a chaotic despotism, as it was proved by the modern example of Poland. The crisis of the barons made a feudal militia unviable, but the rise of the commercial ranks ensured that a standing army was to be dependent on the consent of Parliament. Moreover, against Fletcher, Trenchard and Moyle, Defoe maintained that the "power of the purse" gained by the Commons in the transition towards a commercial society was enough to render harmless any threat of military tyranny of any standing army. The power of raising money was safely in the hands of Parliament and that was a sufficient guarantee that the kings, being wholly dependent on their subjects as to their rent, could not use the power of the sword in an encroaching way(23).
Hume also emphasised how the need of cash of the barons caused their alienation of lands and the progressive rise of a monetary rent, hence the fall of the feudal system (HE, II.524). Therefore,
the manners of the age were a general cause, which operated during this whole period, and which continually tended to diminish the riches, and still more the influence, of the aristocracy, anciently so formidable to the crown. The habits of luxury dissipated the immense fortunes of the ancient barons; and as the new methods of expence gave subsistence to mechanics and merchants, who lived in an independant manner on the fruits of their own industry, a nobleman, instead of that unlimited ascendant, which he was wont to assume over those who were maintained at his board, or subsisted by salaries conferred on them, retained only that moderate influence, which customers have over tradesmen, and which can never be dangerous to civil government. The landed proprietors also, having a greater demand for money than for men, endeavoured to turn their lands to the best account with regard to profit, and either inclosing their fields, or joining many small farms into a few large ones, dismissed those useless hands, which formerly were always at their call in every attempt to subvert the government, or oppose a neighbouring baron. By all these means the cities encreased; the middle rank of men began to be rich and powerful; the prince, who, in effect, was the same with the law, was implicitly obeyed; and though the farther progress of the same causes begat a new plan of liberty, founded on the privileges of the commons, yet in the interval between the fall of the nobles and the rise of this order, the sovereign took advantage of the present situation, and assumed an authority almost absolute (HE, IV.384).
This is a very interesting page, as I believe that it is one of the clearest examples of how the Humean attention towards the manners was connected to politics, and somehow generated it. The Humean history of manners had a clear Montesquiean root and it is was not by chance that in this text Hume referred to the "manners of the age" as to a "general cause": "cause générale" was a key-word in the historical sociology and philosophical history of Montesquieu, whereby he meant not only the remote causes of apparently casual events, but also the underlying general rationale of the historical process(24). An early consequence of such new manners more inclined to consumption and luxury was a rationalization and transformation of agriculture in a capitalistic direction ("turn their land to the best account with regard to profit"). This had an effect on social structure ("the middle rank of men began to be rich and powerful"). Such a new distinction of the ranks then had revolutionary consequences on the constitution and the form of government, proving that power follows property: at first it caused an "authority almost absolute" of the sovereign, before the "privileges of the commons" were fully acknowledged, and taking advantage of the "fall of the nobles".
Among the decisive elements of such a socia transformation Hume listed the granting of liberties and privileges to the cities: that turned out to be a crucial measure in their protection against baronal tyranny and towards the rise of a "third state" (HE, I.278, II.522-23). Between the late sixteenth- and the early seventeenth-century a balance of property clearly on the side of the commons was consolidated: it was accordingly mirrored also in the composition of the parliaments (HE, V.40, 134, 187).
6. In terms of periodization, the relevance of social and moral causes connected to the manners can regard a wide time-span (for instance, between 1485, when Henry VII rose to the throne, and 1640, when was summoned the Long Parliament), or a narrower time-span (between 1558, the year when Elizabeth rose to the throne and the policy of dissolution of the monasteries and the ancient religion was fulfilled, and 1603, the year when James VI and I rose to the English throne): from both periodization however we get a broad historical perspective, focused on long term changes in social relationships(25).
There was also a second, middle-term set of causes: it referred to the disputes between Crown and Parliament culminated in the late Twenties and the Thirties and leading to the so called personal government of Charles I between 1629 and 1640. The common thread of this further set of causes of the civil war is the struggle to limit the royal prerogative and to produce a balance in the English constitution, that so far had been "an inconsistent fabric", swinging between "public liberty" and an "exorbitant prerogative" (HE, V.59, 236). Hume raises here the great unifying theme of early-modern political history, the problem of the relationship between taxation and representation, pressures of public expenditures and inclusion in the sphere of sovereignty.
In terms of periodization, these strictly constitutional causes of the civil war went as far back as the parliamentary debates of 1621, when according to Hume was deployed for the first time a whig ideology (HE, V.95). The constitutional crisis begun on that occasion was fulfilled from the second session of the Long Parliament on (August 1641), when the egemonic strategy of the Commons came to the fore in their claims first to an exclusive exercise of the legislative, then to the executive power of government traditionally entrusted to the royal prerogative, and finally to the power of the sword, with what for Hume amounted to a clear intention to abolish the monarchy in England (HE, V.277, 293, 301, 305, 325, 331, 349, 352, 374-75, 381).
This second set of causes of the civil war had a much narrower periodization span than the social causes and the new manners which explained the new balance of property. While Hume the historian of manners reminds us of Lawrence Stone, Hume the political historian, focused on reconstructing the events and the historical sequence of the "crisis of the parliaments", reminds us of Conrad Russell.
7. There were finally theological and religious causes, and Hume paid great attention to them, given that they precipitated the conflict, as "Religion was the fatal point about which the differences had arisen; and of all others, it was the least susceptible of composition or moderation between the contending parties" (HE, V.526). The religious dimension of the civil war was connected to the lythurgical reform of archbishop Laud: inspired by Arminian theology, he meant to reintroduce in the Anglican lythurgy ceremonial practices and a cult of images going back to the ancient Catholic religion; above all, he intended to apply such innovations to the Scottish presbyterian church as well. This led to the revolt of Edinburgh in 1637 against the Laudian reform and to the signing of the National Covenant. Hume came to have a politically favourable attitude towards the Laudian reform. Turning upside down his previous refusal of superstitious religious ceremonies, in the History of England he approved of such practices, as he believed that the appeal to emotions and the enchanting power of rites could have been a bulwark against the enthusiastic rage of the sects(26) (HE, V.459-60). However he had a sharp awareness of how difficult it would have been to render uniform the English and Scottish ecclesiastical governments. Episcopalianism and presbyterianism were not only two different systems of church government, but also two embodiments of a radically divergent social presence of the church. Moreover, episcopalians and presbyterians both believed that their rivals be crypto-papist. The presebyterian majority in Scotland and the corresponding minority in England accused the Anglicans for the survival of the bishops and the remnants of ceremonial superstition in their system. The Anglican majority in England and the corresponding minority in Scotland replied that the claimed autonomy of spiritual power was a remnant of Catholicism. In such a symmetric context of charges, every project of merging would be vain.
It is to be specified that religion appears in the History of England at the level of a political history of religion, not of a natural history, let alone of course of a Providential history. Religious questions are raised only when religion breaks public peace and becomes a threat to civil life. In an unpublished preface to the second volume of the History of Great Britain (1756) Hume elaborated on this point:
the proper Office of Religion is to reform Men’s Lives, to purify their Hearts, to inforce all moral Duties, & to secure Obedience to the Laws of the civil Magistrate. While it pursues these useful Purposes, its Operations, tho’infinitely variable, are secret & silent; and seldom come under the Cognizance of History. That adulterate Species of it alone, which inflames Faction, animates Sedition, & prompts Rebellion, distinguishes itself on the open Theatre of the World. Those therefore who attempt to draw Inferences disadvantageous to Religion from the Abuses of it mentioned by Historians, proceed upon a very gross & a very obvious fallacy. For besides, that every thing is liable to Abuse, & the best things the most so; the beneficent Influence of Religion is not to be sought for in History: That Principle is always the more pure & genuine, the less figure it makes in those Annals of Wars, & Politics, Intrigues, & Revolutions, Quarrels & Convulsions, which it is the Business of an Historian to record & transmit to Posterity(27).
Philo, arguably Hume’s spokesman in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, complemented this statement when he acknowledged that "if the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it"(28). In the History of England religion is dealt with also from the point of view of the civil peace ensured by the Elizabethan compromise, but there is no doubt that an irreligious sceptic such as Hume was mainly interested in the above mentioned subversive value of religion.
Such religious causes show the complexity of the periodization Hume was to deal with. On one hand they amounted to short-term factors, as they precipitated the outbreak of the civil war ("the disorders in Scotland entirely, and those in England mostly, proceeded from so mean and contemptible an origin"(29), on the other hand however, they were also long-term factors, as the theological and religious conflict in England and more generally in Britain, although it was softened by Elizabeth’s prudent Erastian policy (HE, IV.7, 119), had been long slumbering at the bottom of church and society.
We must therefore ask ourselves whether such a history of religion can be linked to a history of manners. This is definitely legitimate as long as religion, being a system of beliefs, is by definition an element of a people’s manners. However such a relationship does not seem to go beyond this formal analogy. Hume was well aware that the growth of presbyterianism and subsequently of the non-conformist sects could be regarded as the ecclesiastical and religious repercussion of a new social structure, no longer grounded upon authority and hierarchy, but upon an ethical and religious independence. Despite this, such a prominent feature of the historical sociology that we are so familiar with, does not seem to be equally crucial in the case of Hume: on this point Hume remains first and foremost a politique and a heir of the libertinage érudit, committed to show the absurdity and the danger of religious disputes.
8. Hume was by no means the first historian to realise that a suitable narrative of the civil war should take into account such a variety of causal layers. One of the first writings to set such an interpretative framework was Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth (composed around 1667 and published in 1679). Hobbes recognised that the civil war had to be explained through the long-term problem of the conflict between ecclesiastical power and stately institutions, as well as the middle-term question of the growth of presbyterianism, the single feature that led to the outbreak of the war in Britain.
The Behemoth is a work of historical writing which has been until recently unjustly neglected(30) and whose influence on later Anglophone historical writing on the civil war would be very interesting to measure (we can not even be certain whether Hume has read it(31). If compared to the History of England, there are prima facie remarkable differences. They have partly a substantial nature: Hobbes did not pay much attention to the matter of the relationship between power and property, and he focused on the contrary on religious causes and on the question of sovereignty(32). Further differences have a rhetorical and literary nature: Behemoth is a peculiar work of historiography, written in the form of a dialogue between "A" and "B", renouncing partly to a narrative order and dispensing altogether with a chronological arrangement(33). Hume instead, regardless of whether he succeeded or not, attempted at an integration of various periodization scales into a single narrative and chronological history.
These differences however must not lead us to neglect the striking affinities between these two works: the fundamental idea that history is no mere narrative of events, but their understanding in the context of a causal framework is what makes Behemoth and the History of England two philosophical histories.
Hume’s History of England can be seen as a work of counsel in the Renaissance fashion, ending its narrative in 1689 but featuring a clear rhetorical aim, namely showing the danger connected to factionalism. Hume endorsed a policy of moderation and dialogue and by so doing he translated the royalist and Arminian principles of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars into a language of sceptical whiggery and Enlightenment. The ultimate meaning of Hume’s history is the demonstration of the complementary nature of liberty and authority, as "authority, as well as liberty, is requisite to government: and is even requisite to the support of liberty itself, by maintaining the laws, which can alone regulate and protect it" (HE, V.356). The English and British historical experience proved that there can not be a non-dispotic authority without guaranteeing civil liberties for individuals, whereas there can be no civil liberties turning into licence without a political authority capable of enforcing the laws and command obedience. On this crucial point Hume owed a lot to Clarendon. Another source, or one could also say a matrix, can also be remembered in this context: Hume the historian must have certainly been aware of the Life of Agricola where Tacitus remarks that "Nerva Cæsar res olim dissociabiles miscuerit, principatum ac libertatem"(34).
Tacitus provided an important model to Hume the historian, and he once called him "the most penetrating genius of all antiquity"(35). In the celebrated portrait of Hume by Allan Ramsay, painted in 1766 and currently held in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the volumes where the Scottish philosopher places his left arm are Cicero’s De Officiis and Tacitus’s Historiæ, definitely two very different texts, actually two strange bedfellows, but in all likelihood representing the combination of justice and prudence, ideal principles and political reality, jurisprudence and historiography, animating Hume’s political and historical thought(36). Just as Tacitus turned to recent imperial history to draw from it political, moral and psychological teachings in order to point out the shattering consequences of the civil wars, of the rise of the favourites and of the abuse of the law of lese majesté, so Hume turned to English and British history, first recent and then, exactly like Tacitus, more remote, to grasp the roots of the political and ideological questions of his time. Hume renounced to write the contemporary history he seemed to be willing to produce, but even if the History of England did not cover the Hanoverian age it asked a crucial question. With reference to my current topic, such a question was as follows: Was the civil war predictable, and perhaps avoidable? And if it was unavoidable, has it been useful?
9. Hume faced two different answers given to such a question by the fathers of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire had answered: the English civil war was unavoidable and has been useful because it has set the model of a civil war with beneficial consequences, as it was won by the right party: "le fruit des guerres civiles à Rome a été l’esclavage, et celui de troubles d’Angleterre la liberté"(37). Montesquieu had answered: the civil war has not been very useful, since "après bien des mouvements, des chocs et des secousses, il fallut se reposer dans le gouvernement même qu’on avoit proscrit"(38).
To continue using these simplifying formulas, we could say that Hume answered that the civil war was probably avoidable (it remained unpredictable for a long time) but at least it has been useful somehow, as its consequences have been beneficial. Hume learnt that the civil war could and should have been avoidable by reading Clarendon(39): had the parliamentarians followed the path of moderation, had the king not stubbornly asserted his prerogatives, had he not followed the evil counsels of the coterie of Queen Henrietta, had both parties regarded the interests of justice and prudence superior to theological and religious disputes, England could have had a mixed and limited monarchy without undergoing a civil war. After all the personal government of Charles I (1629-40), seen "without regard to the constitution", was from onerous and actually beneficial, as "peace too, industry, commerce, opulence; nay, even justice and lenity of administration, notwithstanding some very few exceptions: All these were enjoyed by the people"(40) (HE, V.249-50). Hume however should stick to facts: for all its interest and relevance, what could have happened did not have the same weight as what had actually happened.
Hume could not however endorse Montesquieu’s opinion, that on this occasion betrayed a certain lack of historical sensitivity. How could one think that, at the Restoration of 1660, the constitution of England was really the same as in the last months of the personal government of Charles I? Montesquieu mistook the royalist propaganda on the restoration of the monarchy for the reality. The achievements of the Commons, the blueprint of a limited monarchy and the plan for a free government were deeply rooted in the society and the public memory. According to Hume, the restored Stuart monarchy attempted to give England "le gouvernement même qu’on avoit proscrit", and for some time managed to hold back the resistance of the friends of liberty, from 1679 called "whigs" (HE, VI.381): eventually, however, it collapsed. Hume did not endorse the whig myth of the revolution of 1688-89. On the contrary he pointed out its contingency and role played in it by tories and Anglicans. Offended by James II’s impeachment against the six bishops they refused to read the Declaration of Indulgence from the pulpits and put temporarily aside their doctrine of passive obedience (HE; VI.502-03). William of Orange, moreover, was called an "invader" by Hume, who emphasized how his only purpose was not to rescue the Protestant interest, but to wear the English crown(41) (HE, VI.511, 515).
We are here facing the question of the civil and moral responsibility of the historian. How to reconcile the authorial voice of the historian of England with the natural progress of civil society which partly brought about the civil war? As we have seen, Hume was persuaded that the struggle between Crown and Parliament was the unavoidable achievement of a deep social change unattainable without a certain amount of upheaval. However he did not renounced to point out the negative aspects of such a change.
10. In connection with the problem of the relationship between the role of human will, the natural progress of society and the role of the historian we can now move to the question of the presence of a language of the unintended consequences in the History of England. We must not mistake the unintended consequences for a stadial theory. The History of England udoubtedly does not recur to the stadial theory. Nowadays among the scholars prevails the idea that a four-stage theory in the form of a conjectural history was a product of the natural-jurisprudential tradition, although it must be said that there appeared also stadial theories inspired to the language of civic humanism and focused on the challenge posed to the survival of civic virtue by the rise of a commercial society(42). Thereby derives the general trend to rectify a previous interpretation, which saw the stadial theory as a direct precedent of historical materialism(43). Neither alternative allows us to easily classify Hume’s historical work. Hume’s belonging to the natural-jurisprudential tradition is an extremely vexed question in its own right and has of late put to the test the best scholarship(44).
In the History of England the stadial theory, already very vaguely endorsed in the Political Discourses, finally disappeared. Hume did refer to the role played by agriculture in the revolution of sedentariness that marked the shift to civilization (HE, I.247, 339-40), but this can not be enough to talk of stadial theory. The idea that the History of England would offer a materialist analysis of society seems reductive and possibly misleading(45).
Although it never feautures a stadial history, the History of England abounds however in explanations founded on the principle of the unintended consequences(46): according to O’Brien the Enlightenment history on the contrary renounced to it, because it implied a "Mandevillian cynicism"(47). According to Hume the importance of history consisted in the fact that it showed "the great mixture of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight" (HE, II.525). Hume’s intellectual debts to Mandeville were rather remarkable(48). Unintended consequences appeared in each of the four successive instalments of his historical work. Leo Braudy was thus not entirely correct when he remarked that impersonal explanations increased in the move from the Stuart to the medieval volumes(49).
The unintended consequences model was employed by Hume on a macrohistorical level to explain the origin of some crucial phenomena. The arguments to which he recurred the question of unintended consequences were various and articulated, and they referred to a number of languages both traditional and innovative.
Among the forms of unintended consequences stands out the Mandevillian argument of "private vices, publick benefits". It emerged neatly in the context of the demise of the feudal barons and the attendant rise of the commons, amounting for Hume to a non-intentional process. When the consumption of luxuries by the nobles rendered impossible that they could maintain a great number of dependants, this triggered a forced increase of industry and the growth of a social class devoted to commerce (HE, III.76-77).
The problem of unintended consequences could however also refer to the question of the role of the individual will of a sovereign in an environment prone to sustain a certain degree of innovation. In such a perspective the most explicit exposition of the rise of unintended benefits is to be found in the context of the discussion of the Act of Supremacy (3 November 1534), whereby Henry VIII brought to completion the Protestant Reformation in England. According to Hume "the acknowledgment of the king’s supremacy introduced there a greater simplicity in the government, by uniting the spiritual with the civil power, and preventing disputes about limits, which never could be exactly determined between the contending jurisdictions". Therefore, "on the whole, there followed from this revolution many beneficial consequences; though perhaps neither foreseen nor intended by the persons who had the chief hand in conducting it" (HE, III.206-07). In a not dissimilar fashion Hume linked the puritans’ fanaticism with the rise of the spirit of liberty in England (HE, IV.123-24, 145-46). The paradoxical outlook of this fact exacted impartiality and philosophical knowledge to be acknowledged.
The acknowledgment of a presence of unintended consequences was also sometimes connected to the traditional recognition of a disproportion between the factors of an event and its far-reaching consequences. While discussing the outbreak of the civil war, Hume for instance remarked that it had derived, in a way unpredictable for its actors, "from so mean and contemptible an origin" as the theological controversy between episcopalists and presbyterians (HE, V.303).
11. Such a meaning of the unintended consequences was hard to separate from the more general awareness of the often casual character of history. The History of England is pervaded with statements concerning the contingent, accidental and unpredictable character of history. The whole renewal of the progress of Western civilization, fallen to its lowest ebb in the late eleventh century, was lastly attributed by Hume to the "accidental finding" of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects that happened in Amalfi in 1130 (HE, II.520). From this casual event derived enormous consequences affecting the whole course of European history. Likewise the challenge between Charles V and Francis I that never took place (1527), although it had "no immediate consequence with regard to these monarchs", produced "a considerable alteration on the manners of the age", by favouring the recur to duels in order to solve "the most trivial incidents" (HE, III.169). Hume’s sensitivity to historical chance led him to acknowledge how Henry VIII "casually steered a course, which led more certainly to arbitrary power, than any which the most profound politics could have traced out of him" (HE, III.214). From the forceful use of the French language imposed by the Normans derived, as an unpredictable side-effect, the best parts of the English language (HE, I.208-09). For the same reason we hear him crying: "a happy innovation; though at first invented for arbitrary purposes!" (HE, III.288).
It would anyway be wrong to limit the discourse of the History of England to the list of the several moments when Hume recurred to the unintended consequences as a principle of historical explanation. To tell the truth, for each of the macrohistorical phenomena which he explained in terms of unintended consequences, Hume also provided other kinds of explanation. The civil war was originated not only by the religious controversies, but also by the willingness of the Commons to fulfill their plan to abolish the English monarchical government (HE, V.352). The crisis of the barons and the rise of the Commons were not only the unpredicted effects of luxury, but also the outcome of kingly policy: "it is probable", Hume wrote, "that Henry foresaw and intended this consequence, because the constant scheme of his policy consisted in depressing the great, and exalting churchmen, lawyers, and men of new families, who were more dependant on him" (HE, III.77). Henry VIII equally could not be completely in the dark about the consequences of his religious reform, so much so that he "was able to set the political machine in that furious movement, and yet regulate and even stop its career" (HE, III.244). As far as the spirit of liberty generated by the Puritans was concerned, lastly, Hume was far from believing that it was only the side-effect of their religious enthusiasm. More than once he referred to a "new plan of liberty", consciously put into action by the presbyterians.
* A shorter Italian version of this article comprising sections 2-5 will appear in Storia della storiografia, 39 (2001) with the title "Periodizzazione storica e generi storiografici: lo scoppio della guerra civile nella History of England di Hume". In quoting Hume’s works I have made use of the following abbreviations (references are given directly in the text, with abbreviation followed by volume and page number):
EMPL (or title of the essay): Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E.F. Miller, revised edition (Indianapolis, 1987);
HE: The History of England form the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 voll. (Indianapolis, 1983);
HL: The Letters of David Hume, edited by J.Y.T. Greig, 2 voll. (Oxford, 1932);
THN: A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised edition by P. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978).
(1) Vd. A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by J.C. Bryce (Oxford, 1983), pp. 90, 98.
(2) Vd. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774), third edition, 2 voll. (London, 1779), vol. I, p. 148.
(3) The best treatment of this issue is that by D. Wootton, Hume’s "Of Miracles": probability and irreligion, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by M.A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), pp. 191-229.
(4) On which compare C.J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 54-60, 77-87.
(5) D. Hume, EMPL, 198.
(6) Ibidem.
(7) In the History of Great Britain (1754) he had specified that this pause in the narrative implied "departing a little from the historical style" (D. Hume, The History of Great Britain, edited by D. Forbes (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 219). The fact that this remark was subsequently removed means a growing confidence in the possibility of a cohabitation between chronological narrative and systematic digressions in historiography.
(8) Vd. E.C. Mossner, "Hume as literary patron: a suppressed review of Robert Henry's History of Great Britain, 1773", Modern Philology, XXXIX (1942), p. 380.
(9) D. Hume, Of Interest, 304.
(10) Although he has acknowledged the absence of commerce from the classical historiographical paradigm, Philip S. Hicks has not sufficiently highlighted Hume’s distance from the ancient historians: vd. P.S. Hicks, Historical Culture from Clarendon to Hume. The Fortunes of Classical British History, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1988, p. 343.
(11) Of the popolousness of the ancient nations, 422. Hume also stated that he wanted to make his work "very concise, after the manner of the Ancients": Hume to John Clephane (5 Jan. 1753), in HL, I.170.
(12) Vd. A. Momigliano, Eighteenth-century prelude to Mr. Gibbon, in Sesto Contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1980), p. 251.
(13) Vd. "Hume's Early Memoranda", edited by E.C. Mossner, Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (1948), p. 508, no. 92.
(14) Vd. A. Momigliano, Ancient history and the antiquarian, in Idem, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 1-39. On the English antiquarians see the classical work by D.C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660-1730, second edition (London 1951). Compare also J.M. Levine, The antiquarian enterprise, 1500-1800, in Id., Humanism and History. Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca and London, 1987), pp. 73-106.
(15) A. Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, 2 voll. (London, 1764), vol. I, pp. vii-viii (factors in the development of commerce), 337 (policy of Henry VII), 347-48 (Reformation).
(16) David Miller has rightly pointed out that Hume saw an interaction between various factors (economic, political and cultural) in the development of society: see D. Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford, 1981), pp. 125-27, but he has not drawn the consequences of his remark for what is related to the question of historical periodization.
(17) J. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), in The Political Works of James Harrington, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 196-201.
(18) J.G.A. Pocock, Historical Introduction, in The Political Works of James Harrington, cit., p. 43.
(19) On Hume’s strictures on classical republicanism see the classic article by J. Moore, "Hume’s political science and the classical republican tradition", Canadian Journal of Political Science, X (1977), pp. 809-39.
(20) J. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, cit., p. 198.
(21) See: L.G. Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies!". The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore and London, 1974), pp. 155-87; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), chaps. 13-14; I. Hont, Free trade and the economic limits to national politics: neo-Machiavellian political economy reconsidered, in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, edited by J. Dunn (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 41-120.
(22) A. Fletcher of Saltoun, Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias (1698), in Id., Political Works, edited by J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 4-6. On Fletcher’s political thought see J. Robertson: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 22-59; Andrew Fletcher’s vision of Union, in Scotland and England, 1286-1815, edited by R.A. Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 203-25.
(23) D. Defoe, An Argument Shewing, that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government (1698), in Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, edited by J.T. Boulton (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 44-48.
(24) Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, chronologie et préface par J. Ehrard (Paris, 1968), p. 145.
(25) In my examples I make use of references drawn from political history. Although this would be inconceivable for us, I believe it fits the "architectonical" primacy of political narrative characterising eighteenth-century historiography.
(26) On Hume’s change of mind see D.T. Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume (London and Toronto, 1990), pp. 106-11.
(27) Quoted by E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, second edition (Oxford, 1980), p. 306.
(28) D. Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, in Id., Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, edited by J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1993), p. 122.
(29) HE, V.303
(30) Some recent studies have made justice to its importance in the history of historical writing: D. Wootton, Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian moments; F. Levy, The background of Hobbes’s Behemoth; P. Springborg, Leviathan, mythic history, and national historiography: all in The Historical Imagination in EarlyModern Britain. History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, edited by D.R. Kelley and D.H. Sacks (Cambridge, 1997), respectively at pp. 210-42, 243-66, 267-97. See also J. Steinberg, The Obsession of Thomas Hobbes (New York, 1988).
(31) In the eighteenth century Behemoth was reprinted only once, in Hobbes’ Moral and Political Works published in London in 1750, pp. 487-588. On the reasons of the disappearance of Hobbes’ ideas from the political debate from the Restoration onwards see S.I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan. Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962), and M. Goldie, The Reception of Hobbes, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, edited by J.H. Burns with the assistance of M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 589-615. Onofrio Nicastro has once written that a research on the reception of Hobbes in the eighteenth century "potrebbe forse riservare qualche sorpresa" (see his Introduzione to T. Hobbes, Behemoth, edited by O. Nicastro (Bari, 1978), p. xlvii). If one could prove an influence of Hobbes on Hume as a historian, the insight of Nicastro would be confirmed.
(32) See T. Hobbes, Behemoth, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir W. Molesworth (London, 1840), vol. VI, p. 243.
(33) Compare D. Wootton, Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments, cit., p. 220.
(34) Tacitus, De Vita Iulii Agricolæ, III.1.
(35) Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume’s Enquiries, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised edition by P. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 123.
(36) On Hume’s Ciceronianism see P. Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh, 1982). There is no detailed study of Hume and Tacitus.
(37)Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (1734), letter VIII (Paris, 1986), p. 66.
(38) Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1748), livre III, chap. 3, in Id., Œuvres complètes, 2 voll., edited by R. Caillois (Paris, 1951), vol. II, p.252.
(39) See B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon. Politics, Historiography and Religion, 1640-1660 (Cambridge, 1989), passim, in part. pp. 32-36, 81-83.
(40) Hume was here endorsing an opinion of Clarendon: see Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, 6 voll., edited by W.D. Macray (Oxford, 1888), vol. I, pp. 83-84.
(41) On Humean irony in the account of the Glorious Revolution see N. Phillipson, Hume (London, 1989), pp. 105-07.
(42) See M.L. Pesante, "La teoria stadiale della storia e l’analisi economica: Adam Smith", Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, XXIX (1995), pp. 249-51.
(43) See: K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator. The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 181-83; D. Winch, Adam Smith's "enduring particular result": a political and cosmopolitan perspective, in Wealth and Virtue. The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983), p. 258; I. Hont, The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the "Four Stages Theory", in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by A. Pagden (Cambridge, 1987); J. Salter, "Adam Smith on feudalism, commerce and slavery", History of Political Thought, XIII (1992), pp. 219-41. For the interpretation of the four-stages theory in terms of historical materialism, see: R. Pascal, "Property and society: the scottish contribution of the eighteenth century", Modern Quarterly, I (1938), pp. 167-79; A.S. Skinner, Adam Smith: an economic interpretation of history, in Essays on Adam Smith, edited by A.S. Skinner and T. Wilson (Oxford, 1975), pp. 154-78; R.L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976); P. Stein, Legal Evolution. The Story of an Idea (Cambridge, 1980).
(44) Duncan Forbes is of course the one who first linked Hume to the natural-jurisprudential tradition: vd. Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975). More recently Knud Haakonssen, working on Forbes’ assumption, has underlined the experimental character of Hume’s natural jurisprudence and his substitution of the language of natural and artificial virtues for the language of rights: see K. Haakonssen, The structure of Hume's political theory, in The Cambridge Companion to David Hume, edited by D.F. Norton (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 199-201. Those who do not endorse the idea that Hume belonged to the natural-jurisprudential tradition either remind us that he preferred the principle of utility to the laws of nature (as James Moore has done), or maintain that Hume’s language of interest, conventions and opinion can not be reconciled to the natural-jurisprudential language of promises, contracts and consent (as Nicholas Phillipson has done): vd. J. Moore, Hume and Hutcheson, in Hume and Hume's Connexions, edited by M.A. Stewart and J.P. Wright (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 47-51; N. Phillipson, Propriety, property and prudence: David Hume and the defence of the Revolution, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, edited by N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 302-20 (in part., p. 314, note 36).
(45) For the picture of Hume as a materialist historian see C.N. Stockton, Economics and the mechanism of historical progress in Hume's history, in Hume. A Re-Evaluation, edited by D.W. Livingston and J.T. King (New York, 1976), in part. pp. 313, 315.
(46) Vd. R. Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale and Edwardsville,1987), pp. 10-13.
(47) K. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment. Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 56-92.
(48) Vd.: M.M. Goldsmith, "Regulating anew the moral and political sentiments of mankind: Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish Enlightenment", Journal of the History of Ideas, XLIX (1988), pp. 587-606; E. Lecaldano, Hume e la nascita dell'etica contemporanea (Roma-Bari, 1991), pp. 228-39; E.J. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable. Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82-86.
(49) Vd. L. Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction. Hume, Fielding and Gibbon (Princeton, 1970), p. 39.