Brother Hume on the Continent

David Hume was secretary, and finally chargé, at the British embassy in Paris from 1763 to 1766, and from his own account, enjoyed his time there. Although socially inept, he was pleasant, a bon viveur and wildly popular. He was in his element restoring Franco-British cordiality in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, which also gave England the whip hand in commerce. He came to value the “great number of sensible, knowing and polite companions with which the city abounds above all places in the universe”. Voltaire, who read Hume’s books, returned the compliment, calling him “Frère Hume”.

Life was perhaps never so kind. Hume made vast sums from his History of England but failed at tilts at university chairs, including Glasgow (given to Adam Smith, his friend). On appointment to Chatham’s Whig government, in 1767, he lamented his fall from “high status of philosopher” to “petty under-secretary”.

At six volumes or so, the History is a good, if hardy, read.² In part a defence of the “Glorious Revolution”, it went through several editions, each kinder on the Tories than the one before, giving rise to allegations that Hume was not a loyal Whig historian but a hypocrite. This is to misunderstand Hume, the condition of England at the time, and perhaps the nature of English political writing, which has always reflected a sense of England in the historical moment—think Hobbes, Locke or Burke. On the continent, by contrast, such writing is far more prone to universalising or to system-making in the abstract—think Fénélon, Kant or Hegel, or almost anyone apart from Voltaire.

The political condition of England in the two centuries before Hume is well recorded, and makes for sobering reading. Bacon perhaps summed up one century:

Libels and licentious discourses against the state, when they are frequent and open; and in like sort, false news, often running up and down to the disadvantage of the state, and hastily embraced; are amongst the signs of troubles.³

Despite the warning, discourse in the next century was frequently open. “Natural law” doctrines were invoked violently by all sides. An early writer, Bishop Poynet, attracted attention by citing “Gentile” views on the lawfulness of killing the tyrant and deposing a king. Christopher Goodman, Knox’s friend and companion on the continent, wrote a tract titled How Superior Powers Should Be Obeyed and Wherein They May Be Lawfully and By God’s Word Resisted. Dissent and religious quarrels were ever present: Rudyerd said, “Let religion be our premum querite for all things are but etceteras to it”. Milton, soft on crime but tough on the causes of crime, disagreed with so much so often he was known politically as “a libertine who would be tied by no obligation to God or Man”. (On travels in Italy, he was known as socially incompetent for wilfully airing views on Protestantism in the face of his Italian hosts.) Penalties for disagreeing were not lightly dismissed: Whitelock, intending to turn down a commission from Cromwell as ambassador to Sweden, said to his valet, “Why, what can he do to me?” The valet replied, “What can he not do?” Whitelock went to Sweden.⁴

The Humean moment came after two centuries of strife and disaster, albeit ending in the “Glorious Revolution”, if it was a revolution. The “Eighty-Eight” secured enduring settlement for England between its ruling and rising classes, although this was not obvious at the time. It was set in place not at a single stroke but by at least a dozen Acts passed and (some) repealed up until 1701. Political indifference grew under Walpole and Whiggery but so did corruption, sectarianism and factionalism, as testified by Augustan literature, for example, Pope, Addison and Swift. Hume felt the shadows too, hated the Scottish and London mobs and wrote to guide readers towards preferable social virtues: the pursuit of money and property—albeit guided by human sympathy—and happiness.⁵

Hume seems best known in English as a philosopher in the English manner, concerned with the epistemological properties of tables and chairs, perhaps with a good burgundy to follow. It may thus be a surprise to the common reader to find that the bulk of his writings deals with history, politics and economics. He wanted to apply scientific methods invented in the previous century to human nature and society, limiting “knowledge” to what could be verified from perception and experience, along the way abolishing any provable link between cause and effect, certain knowledge and belief.⁶ His distinction between “belief” and “knowledge” proved double-edged: it excluded belief from certain “knowledge” but not from the mental universe—as the next generation of German idealists proved. But if his effort thus seems flawed, at least his purpose was clear: to sideline dangerous beliefs of religion, revolutionaries and utopians. He wrote not for abstractions but to shore up his society.

Hume, who had a sense of style, thus waxed merry at the expense of Whigs and Tories, revolutionaries and utopians, religious superstition and sectarians. He debunked religion, its practices and its miracles, saying the only miracle he could see was the one needed to believe in them. He was scathing of revolutions. Whig ideas of “social contract” vanished like mist. From Plato on, there had been scores of such theories, usually based on some notion of primitive man’s vicious nature. He saw no good reasoning for Socrates’s acceptance of unjust death at the hands of the state, calling his decision passive Tory obedience to a Whig contract. He jettisoned the social contract altogether as a complete fiction. For Hume, any constitution was an artificial construction founded on political facts of a particular time. Anywhere he could see, governments were instituted and maintained by force and accepted by people as a matter of custom, just as dictatorships were accepted, and perhaps sometimes still are.⁷

The History also rejected triumphalist Whig theories, which tried to draw genetic lines of democratic descent from ancient Britain to the present. It scotched ideas that the witan had been a proto-parliament, showed French-inspired feudalism was by definition undemocratic and that Magna Carta failed to alter the distribution of power: “liberty” preserved the rights of barons, not those of the people. Parliament’s “encroachment” on royal prerogative did not justify Whig ideas on constitutionality because there was no constitution—warfare was simply open-ended, punctuated by occasional truces.

But in the end, Hume wound up appealing to all the ideas he had debunked. In 1774 he re-edited “Of the Origin of Government”, showing more favour to the social contract. He re-rebalanced the History so it appeared with “corrections” (over a hundred) that favoured Tory as much as Whig views, or were neutral. Perhaps most astonishingly, he affirmed the existence of “the Deity”.⁸ He wholly supported the American Revolution. He wrote essays debunking historical Christianity, and on suicide, but held off having them published until after his death. These days scholars tend to lash out at such Nicodemism, and in the sometimes numbing way of scholars, they may be right. But given his interests, Hume favoured practical political stability. He was not alone. Other would-be state-builders, such as Plato, had already judged the “noble lie” basic to peace, order and good government.

Like Keynes in a later age, Hume recognised that facts were liable to change. He saw stable government much as a machine or the human body—in need of careful tending against recurrent attack (as foreshadowed by Bacon) or outright decay. He thought constitutional change should be brought about “by such gentle alterations and innovations as may not give rise to too much disturbance to society.”⁹ Against political or religious sects, vocabularies of “balance” and “moderation” shine through his works, signs of the English genius for creative, if sometimes messy, compromise also seen in the “Two Nations” era. It’s easy to see his urbane manner as his way of holding the ring against opponents, first, one dominant party, then another, or both. The tension is familiar enough to any modern chairperson trying to keep everybody on board, or if that is impossible, offend everybody equally.

Hume (unlike Montesquieu) was a sceptic on national character—especially on the influence of climate, feeling that differences between the people of Wapping and St James could not possibly be attributed to the climate. But for all his exposure to Enlightenment salons, Hume thought English exceptionalism best. “Of all peoples in the universe”, he mused, “the English have the least of a national character; unless this very singularity may appear to pass for such”. It produced a balanced system of government, which he compared favourably against Holland, Germany, France and Spain:

English government is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The people in authority are composed of gentry and merchants. All sects of religion are to be found among them. And great liberty and independency, which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him.¹⁰

If his last remark seems forgetful of his own theory, he can hardly have felt it wrong in practice had he to deal with Voltaire, a man of many manners peculiar to him.¹¹

Hume seems to have thought, however, that no one knew about the Continent before he went there, a foible occasionally still met with among today’s diplomats. The History, for example, records, correctly enough, that force was used to found Britain but manages to state that before Cromwell and the Puritans went to Ireland, there was no civilising influence there. This overlooks the fact that Charlemagne’s empire could not have functioned without the monks and clerics drawn from Ireland—and other peripheral countries, Scandinavia, Spain and England—who ran it.¹²

Hume’s slip is arguably one that says something deeper about Anglo-Saxon attitudes. England has been subject since early medieval times to influences originating in Scandinavia, Denmark, and especially via the Western Christian Church, Italy, France and Spain (although later Catholicism never gained much purchase and adherents were excluded from public office until 1829). English religion, English law and English language have been strongly marked by such influences but for all that England has not been much part of Europe. Influences have instead been absorbed and domesticated—in the Book of Common Prayer, in the common law’s own “thousand years of continuous development” and in the language where the spelling of words remains much as in Elizabethan times although pronunciation has wildly changed. Anything foreign has been disguised in English as home-grown to the point where it would “be tedious to unpick the threads”.¹³

For its part, the Continent has often had trouble accepting things English. English travellers, until overtaken in the last century by other nations, were a source of deep worry.¹⁴ English religious inspiration was always disturbing on the Continent, a perspective that tends to be obscured by blockbuster narratives on the origins of the Western Church in Mediterranean controversy. From the start, in fact, the inspirational ideas of Pelagius—Latin for the British Morgan, “man of the seas”—were a stimulus to heresy in Europe. Friedrich Heer, a medieval historian, says Augustine spotted the siren call of the Pelagian “song of freedom”—one reason Augustine inveighed so heavily against all heresies, although ironically, he himself wound up favouring small group monastic piety over official Church authority.¹⁵ Successive popes also recognised the threat: personalist ideas underpinned utterances of solitary mystics, and in later centuries, vatic doctrines of Cathars or Waldensians in Southern France, Eastern Germany and Bohemia. (The sheer longevity of ideas in one place remains striking: some of the same Toulousain family names from Cathar times reappear during the French Revolution; fortune telling, another part of the vatic complex, is still an official occupation in Romania.) Nor were later English intellectual movements shy about intervening on the Continent. Wycliff actively disseminated his ideas, as did religio-social English dissenters such as the Diggers, Levellers and Lollards, all movements watched and feared by continental rulers.

The issue has not been English indifference to the Continent. Hume points out that England put blood and iron into securing territory in France during the Hundred Years War and sought serious political influence on the Continent through monarchical alliances in Holland and Germany. Later of course England made efforts at controlling Europe by land in response to Napoleon’s wars but they did not pay off and were eventually abandoned. Thereafter England came to rely on the balance-of-power system to manage European relations, and on the navy for defence, whilst pivoting to exploration and adventure in the larger world. As seen from the Continent, the English pattern of conduct shows up as successive advances followed by rapid retreats to independence or greener fields.¹⁶ The impulsions, it may be added, are reflected in English utopian writing, which has never situated the fabled land anywhere on the Continent but always in foreign places, usually islands with a distinctly secular outlook. Samuel Hartlib, for example, reported in A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641), that the people of this land “over the seas” lived “in great Plenty, Prosperity, Health, Peace and Happiness” with “not half so much trouble as they have in these European countries”.

Likely enough, Hume’s letter of instructions for Paris called for balancing broader and deeper relations with France against England’s pivot to the wider world. Goodbye to Europe meant greetings to new horizons, challenges inspiring Englishmen and women to go out and settle North America, drive the French out of India and so on. Hume was impressed by the globalisation opening up before his eyes: the enormous expansion of real geographical knowledge, of scientific and technical invention, of industry, speed of communications and the replacement of old-style protectionism by self-regulating market economies.⁷ He concluded that governments should occupy themselves mainly with the material prosperity of their people and the conditions of commerce. These were radical postures. As he points out, most classical writers, such as Xenophon, mention commerce only in passing,¹⁸ and everyone knows what the disappointed aristocrat Plato thought of the people. Governments today, if they see trade as diplomacy’s main business, channel Hume.

Neither Hume nor Voltaire was a democrat (both thought enlightened monarchy best), and Hume wrote in a society the conflicts of which pitted wealthy merchants against old nobility, well before the rise of a substantial middle class. Overall, it seems hard to distinguish Hume’s remarks on English government and character from those made by his successors in office two hundred years later, for example, the Rt. Hon. Richard Law, MP:

The community has always counted for more than the State in England, and the individual for more than the community … It is in this respect, no doubt, that the House of Commons is almost completely characteristic of the community of England, in that it is a reflection alike of the class structure of English society and of the class struggle, which while it has never been pushed to extremes, has always permeated English society.¹⁹

Many of those who have dealt personally with modern Britain know from experience that class borders, if real, are yet permeable, open to those rising through the ranks. Hume’s own ascent—Scotsman “of good family”—may prove a point, though it may also reflect the English recognition that Scots have ever been the best representatives of England abroad.²⁰

Conclusion

Since Law’s day, too, England has passed from “Fool Britannia” to “Cool Britannia” and beyond, along the way becoming partly globalised, multi-ethnic and highly secularised.²¹ Peter Mandler has charted the rise and wane of national identity through to this century.²² Theodore Dalrymple, a cultural pessimist who agrees with Hume on things French, adds welfarism as a new woe for England.²³ But Hume was nothing if not highly secular. Waning by globalisation surely invites scepticism.²⁴ Angst over welfarism existed in 1887: “Sympathy with suffering, especially suffering of the weak, has grown so strong that it disturbs the judgment.”²⁵ By 1837, de Tocqueville had already noted the ease with which the poor manipulated English charity laws (Sur le paupérisme).

Surfaces change but does political character? On this, Voltaire took his cue from Destouches, who said, “Chase off nature and she comes back at a gallop”, unless, as Voltaire added, refined reasoning prevails. He cited the case of “the ninety-year-old general who, chancing upon some young officers amid ‘un peu de désordre avec des filles’, bawled out angrily: ‘Gentlemen, is this the example I set you?’”²⁶ Military views aside, comparative history, at any rate, shows England achieved settlement between its ruling and rising classes earliest of all nations, and with that factor for talent to rise, has time and again backed empirical Humean instincts for balance, moderation and compromise. A system of “muddling along”, perhaps, likely to produce more globalisation, not less, but a universal “felicific calculus” has always been elusive. And don’t forget English weather, and the light—a greyness unbelievable to Australians and New Zealanders—which blurs all divisions and edges. As does the humour: still “alike in the north and the south this mixture of grumbling and joking”.²⁷ On shortlists of lucky countries, weather aside, England is arguably luckiest.

Even so, those unconvinced that standards of French philosophes are appropriate to Hume may want to judge him on the more rigorous, more modern, Anglo-American scale. How, then, does Hume rate? Hypocrite? Not at all. Lecteur? Far better, philosophe. Frere? Definitely.

John Goodman is a former New Zealand diplomat and Visiting Scholar, Auckland University School of Law.

Notes:

1 Paul Lay, “Historians and Brexit,” History Today, July, 2016; Lawrence Summers, “How to embrace nationalism responsibly,” Washington Post, 10 July, 2016.

2 History of England, London, 1778.

3 Essays, “Of Seditions and Troubles,”

4 Citations are from: G P Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1927, Harper Torchbook edition, 1959.

5 E C Mossner, The Life of David Hume, New York, 1954. James Harris’ Hume: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge, 2016, adds to but does not supplant Mossner, according to Anthony Gottlieb, NYRB, May 26, 2016.

6 The Treatise on Human Nature, 1739, p79.

7 “Of the original contract,” Essays.

8 “Appendix to be inserted in The Treatise,” Treatise, p.633.

9 “Idea of a perfect commonwealth,” Essays.

10 “Of National Characters”, Essays.

11 Ian Davidson, Voltaire: a Life, London, 2010.

12 E R Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Eng trans, 1963, p.35.

13 A T P Williams, “Religion”; Lord Simonds, “Law”; C T Onions, “The English Language”; in Ernest Barker, ed, The Character of England, London, 1947.

14 Rebecca West, “The Englishman Abroad,” in Barker (ed), p481.

15 Mittelalter, Zurich, 1961, S.177; Europaishe Geistesgeschichte, Stuttgart, 1953 S.414.

16 Curtius, op cit. p.35.

17 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, London, 1944, p.76.

18 “Of Civil Liberty,” Essays, p.63.

19 Rt Hon Richard Law, MP, “The Individual and the Community,” in E Barker (ed), pp.28; 46.

20 Ibid, p.34.

21 Robert Tombs, The English and their History, London, 2014, p.884.

22 The English National Character, New Haven, 2006. Kate Fox’s (vastly entertaining) Watching the English, London, 2014, essentially confirms Barker; she sees English social ineptitude via modern lenses but Milton and Hume show this is not new,

23 Not with Bang but a Whimper, Chicago, 2008.

24 John Goodman, “Myths of Globalisation,” New Zealand Annual of International Law, 2008, p3-38.

25 Spectator, April 1887, cited in Mandler, p109.

26 Dictionnaire philosophique, Garnier edition, 1967, p62. Writer’s translation.