Abstract
A rich secondary literature has developed around Hume’s History of England. In the role of historian, Hume has been described as a reformer of British political culture,1 a Baconian natural historian of morals,2 a failed scientific historian,3 a reactionary struggling with the liberalism of his early career,4 a ‘scientific’ whig who transcended political parties,5 a student of the ‘science of man,’6 a ‘practical’ moralist.7 While most recent studies of Hume have focused on his central place in the history of modern philosophy and his History as somehow a part of that philosophy, they have tended to lose sight of Hume’s ties to classical historiography,8 ties Hume as well as his original readers readily acknowledged. It is the contention of this Chapter that Hume and his audience saw the History as a neoclassical work intended to solve the weakness in English historiography. Perhaps above all other ambitions, Hume’s most ardent wish was to construct such a work. It is the task of this Chapter to show how the various philosophical and political projects just mentioned could be subsumed in a neoclassical narrative that would earn a European reputation as a literary masterpiece.
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Notes
Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
Giuseppe Giarrizzo, David Hume politico e storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), reviewed by Duncan Forbes in Historical Journal, 6 (1963), pp. 280–94.
Donald T. Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 9, 19.
Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James 1 to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London, 1763–83). Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). I intend to pursue the Macaulay-Hume relationship in a separate study of eighteenth-century historiography. For Hume and women, see Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed., intro., Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 114.
David Womersley, The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 54, 80–8.
Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian 1772–1794 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 67–70, 263.
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© 1996 Philip Hicks
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Hicks, P. (1996). David Hume as a Neoclassical Historian. In: Neoclassical History and English Culture. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376151_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376151_7
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