David Hume. Mark G. Spencer
Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 215–17. Lottenbach, though, points out that most rivals to Hume’s position are not actually self-defeating, and are in fact capable of reflexive self-approval. He sees little to distinguish reflexive self-approval from “complacent self-congratulation,” “Monkish Virtues, Artificial Lives,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 3 (1996): 387. It is important to recognize both the power and the limits of this sort of internal criticism; it is inherently one part logic and one part rhetoric.
42. This is not to say, of course, that Enlightenment historiography won the day. Indeed, while Hume’s History of England undeniably established his reputation as an author, it was not in its own day received as impartial. In the next generation, Romantic historiographers critiqued Hume for a general failure of empathy with his subjects, not simply those dominated by religious convictions; Hume’s approach was seen as too abstract, too detached. The Romantic ideal was itself to be displaced by nineteenth-century philosophical historians who likewise dismissed Hume, now for lacking insight into the structural forces driving historical change. See Mark Salber Phillips and Dale R. Smith, “Canonization and Critique: Hume’s Reputation as a Historian,” in The Reception of David Hume in Europe, ed. Peter Jones (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 312–13.
43. Jackson, “Historiography: Britain,” 504; Catherine Bell, “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 33; Alister Chapman, “Intellectual History and Religion in Modern Britain,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 232.
44. Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 138; emphasis in original.
45. Ibid., 138.
46. Ibid., 144.
“THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY”: HISTORICAL CAUSATION AND POLITICAL RHETORIC IN THE AGE OF HUME
In his History of England (1754–62), David Hume routinely used such phrases as “the spirit of independency” and “the spirit of opposition” (H 5:147, 6:387), commonplace language for eighteenth-century Britain. The notion that a person or collectivity might possess a “spirit” or distinguishing characteristic connected to a larger climate of opinion immediately calls to mind Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748).1 Yet such language actually predated Montesquieu and was comparatively new to British historical writing when Hume applied it to his account of the British civil wars. Hume adopted the phrase “the spirit of liberty” as a key explanatory device in his History, convenient shorthand for a combination of political and religious ideals that motivated Britons to oppose what they perceived to be excessive monarchical power. Hume plucked this term from the world of partisan politics and redefined it as part of a larger project promoting political moderation. Yet we shall see that choosing to deploy such a multivalent rhetoric had ironic consequences for his narrative. One of Hume’s goals was to write an utterly secular account of the English past, but using “the spirit of liberty” according to the grammatical rules set forth by its progenitor, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, actually made it resemble providence to a startling degree.2 In a further irony, while Hume wanted to defuse this highly charged slogan, his own extensive use of the term only made it more popular, especially as a way of understanding political upheaval, past and present. On both sides of the Atlantic, Hume’s History helped to shape the vocabulary used to explain the seventeenth-century British and eighteenth-century American and French revolutions.3
Given Hume’s penchant for “the spirit of liberty,” it is perhaps surprising to locate its intellectual origins in a Machiavellian tradition that ran counter to Hume’s conviction that institutions and laws are more powerful determinants of a nation’s political well-being than the manners and morals of its leaders.4 During the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s study of the ancient republics convinced him that liberty in a republic could best be preserved not so much by adjusting the institutional machinery of government as by ensuring that the value of political liberty was nurtured in the people as a whole. Such a perspective emphasized structural and impersonal factors such as the spirit of the times and public opinion and imagined the polity as possessing its own characteristics and desires.5 In Britain, Machiavelli’s analysis influenced “Country” political groups that developed in the 1690s to defend parliamentary independence against encroaching executive power. These “True” or “Old” Whigs relied heavily on the political writings of such “Commonwealthmen” as James Harrington, Edmund Ludlow, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Toland. In many cases, these thinkers were more concerned that the ethos of liberty be preserved than whether the actual form of government was a republic or a monarchy. It was in this ideological context that the expression “the spirit of liberty” was coined. Ludlow’s Memoirs of the civil wars, written in the 1660s and redacted by Toland, twice referred to this “spirit” as an opponent of Oliver Cromwell’s despotic actions.6
By the time the Memoirs were published in 1698, the phrase had begun to enter the lexicon of the British political class. In that year, a precocious nineteen-year-old, whose future as a Tory secretary at war and later a Jacobite secretary of state still lay ahead of him, wrote a letter to his mentor Sir William Trumbull. Henry St. John stated that whereas patriotism and “zeal for liberty” were once “imprinted on our hearts,” the opposite values now held sway in Britain. St. John traced those traditional political virtues to the Romans. Even after ancient Britain threw off the Romans’ legal system, he noted, “their divine spirit (if I might use the expression) shed its influence on us.” After making this distinction between laws and their “spirit,” and citing republican tags from Tacitus, Cicero, and Horace, St. John went on to observe that liberty-loving people had historically been enslaved not by force of arms but by the corruption of manners. He gave the Greek example of Cyrus, who failed to pacify the Lidians militarily because “the spirit of Liberty crost his designs, and stopt the course of his victories.”7 The spirit of liberty, as St. John viewed it, was thus more powerful than armies or laws; it was a god-like, “divine” influence; it was republican. These were the germs of a concept St. John would fully develop thirty years later and eventually bequeath to Hume.
During those years “the spirit of liberty” was occasionally mentioned in British political writings, essays, and histories.8 Yet, as in the case of St. John’s letter, it rarely appeared more than once in any given work; it was not deployed systematically in any purposeful way until St. John, now Lord Bolingbroke, mounted a decade-long political campaign, beginning in 1725, against the Whig regime of Sir Robert Walpole. To unite his coalition of fellow Tories and disaffected Whigs, Bolingbroke had to justify the very idea of political opposition and refute the charge that he was raising a treasonous “faction” of the sort that caused the civil wars. This was the goal of the Remarks on the History of England, twenty-four essays he published under the pseudonym Humphrey Oldcastle between September 1730 and May 1731 in his paper The Craftsman. Here Bolingbroke tried turning the tables on his opponents by pinning the label of “faction” on them. Drawing from Renaissance humanism’s preoccupation with internal faction as the enemy of liberty and its technique of dividing history into good and evil periods based on republican criteria,9 Bolingbroke went through English history showing how “the spirit of liberty” had always supported the national interest in the face of the self-interested “spirit of faction” that Walpole’s Court Whigs now fomented.10 England had the trappings of liberty, Bolingbroke argued, but Walpole’s placemen, pensions, and bribes corrupted its political institutions, which were free in name only. The spirit of liberty alone could give life to the institutions of liberty, the English laws and system of government. Resuscitating the “Country” platform, Bolingbroke cited Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy as the source of