Abstract
Of England during his own time, David Hume thought that one could affirm justly, and without any danger of exaggeration, that it enjoyed “the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”1 His History of England is the story of how this remarkable and unprecedented system of liberty came into being. The theme of liberty, above all other themes, gives continuity to Hume’s detailed examination of English constitutional development from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Revolution in 1688. The main lessons that he wishes to draw and the major errors of interpretation that he wishes to correct have to do with liberty. In raising the question of liberty, therefore, we go directly to the heart of Hume’s historical enterprise and open up the possibility of understanding English history as he meant for it to be understood.
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Notes
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, edited by William B. Todd (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983–85), vol. 6, p. 531. Subsequent citations to this edition of the History will appear in the text of this essay.
Paul Rapin, whose History of England was read widely in the eighteenth century, wrote that “whatever changes have occurred in other European nations, the English constitution has remained the same.” Quoted in Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979), p. 73. Wexler adds: “... this insistence on the fundamental continuity of English institutions and customs, from Saxon times to the Glorious Revolution, was indeed the hallmark of Whiggery.”
Quoted as the epigraph to H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974).
Quoted in Wexler, David Hume and the History of England, p. 72.
Quoted in Wexler, David Hume, pp. 71–72.
See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
Accounts of the Whig view of the Saxon period can be found in Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, pp. 25–32; Wexler, David Hume and the History of England, pp. 70–74; and Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 233–260. It should be noted that not every Whig between 1680 and the mid-eighteenth century subscribed to this view of England’s Saxon past. The most notable exceptions were the writers who, in the 1730’s, defended Walpole’s ministry against the attacks of Bolingbroke.
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters and translated by Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964). The Introduction and Editor’s Notes to this edition bring out the ironic character of Rousseau’s praise of rude and unenlightened societies.
David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller (rev. ed.; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), p. 277.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, p. 54.
See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 42–45; 53–55; 192–93; Wexler, David Hume and the History of England, pp. 72–78.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, p. 41; History, 6.533.
See “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, pp. 512–529.
Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 78.
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, translated by Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974).
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Miller, E.F. (1990). Hume on Liberty in the Successive English Constitutions. In: Capaldi, N., Livingston, D.W. (eds) Liberty in Hume’s History of England. Archives Internationales D’histoire des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 130. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0535-1_3
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