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The History of England #2
The History of England 2
subtitle: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688
David Hume's great, enduring reputation in philosophy tends to obscure the fact that, among his contemporaries, his history of England was a more successful work. The history covers almost 1800 years. Hume saw English history as an evolution from a government of will to a government of law. Advanced in Hume's masterly prose, this argument continues to make the "History" a valuable study for the modern reader. This Liberty Fund edition is based on the edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume. The typography has been modernized for ease of reading. Hume's own index to the entire work may be found at the conclusion of volume VI.
David Hume's great, enduring reputation in philosophy tends to obscure the fact that, among his contemporaries, his history of England was a more successful work. The history covers almost 1800 years. Hume saw English history as an evolution from a government of will to a government of law. Advanced in Hume's masterly prose, this argument continues to make the "History" a valuable study for the modern reader. This Liberty Fund edition is based on the edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume. The typography has been modernized for ease of reading. Hume's own index to the entire work may be found at the conclusion of volume VI.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
548 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1803
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About the author
David Hume
3,156 books1,688 followersDavid Hume was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism.
In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day.
His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem.
Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell, and Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy). Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers".
In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day.
His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem.
Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell, and Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy). Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers".
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2020
Facts and details in isolation make not a story let alone a history. Those same facts and details when weaved into a tapestry reflected by a master story telling makes for the best understanding of the self in the guise of a history. Once again, in this volume, for the English of 1760 they can see this book as its national epic.
In the first volume, Hume created the fiction of a people through the perspective of the elite ruling classes, the Anglo-Saxon-Jute-Dane-Norman peoples who ultimately identify as the English people while forgetting the masses and the indigenous inhabitants: the Picts, Scots, Welsh, and Celtic Britons.
In this second volume he is creating a nation, and as we all know a nation must consist of laws, customs and traditions even when the story that is unfolding is a story of a family feud among elite ruling cousins who are striving to control or destroy the other family member ultimately leading to the War of the Roses. Hume is forcing a nationhood on the people as a whole even while the background is often characterized by the capricious and subject to the arbitrary nature of tyrants and conniving folks. Hume does this, in order for the people of his time period to explain who they were in the past within Hume’s frame of reference and his thrownness of his time period. Hume must force a nation on to his exposition because that’s what he has as he is writing and he already knows what the end point must become.
Hume considers almost all religious beliefs from the period of time he is writing about as superstitious magic and sees Papist as controlling and holding the nation down as they from time-to-time foist their near necromancy beliefs where they don’t belong, and don’t even get me started on how according to Hume the Jews have what’s coming to them for their usury and their arrogance and women are not as virtuous as men and tend to be emotional in their thought overall except for the one or two, or maybe it was three women who weren’t, after all, the Anglican perspective of 1760 is clearly the lens that Hume is given as truth and that all the history that he describes must first go through his biases of his thrownness of his time period. All of this just makes this history all the more wonderful as one reads this second volume.
The story of the Scots and their assimilation within the English Kingdoms are told in such a way that they are as good if not better than the English and I had to temporarily pause in order to reflect on why their story was so much better than what was transpiring with the Welsh, than I remember that, of course, Hume is a Scot, an enlightened Scot nevertheless, after all no-true-Scotsman would tell anything but such a story (j/k). Good history story telling needs an attitude and from time-to-time that is what you get within this volume.
The War of the Roses was as amazingly told as the story of Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orleans is presented better than I’ve ever seen elsewhere and Hume puts the context around it and he’ll tell it from a perspective that makes the English Papist out to be in need of manners and a plan. He’ll make the point that the English were never really ever going to be able to permanently occupy the French lands anyways and really needed to adapt to that inevitable disappointment.
Wycliffe gets special mention within Hume’s telling. He and his movement were the first cracks within the dam of superstition and paved the way for the end of those superstitious Papist ultimately leading to the more rational religion of Hume’s readers of 1760 England, at least Hume seems to think so. The only problem, according to Hume, is Wycliffe was just a little bit too much ahead of his time but Hume takes delight in presenting the story regardless. (I’ve always thought of Hume as a deist not a Christian, but from this book, one would conclude that he was a good member in good standing in the Anglican Church).
After every King, the next King, or maybe the House of Commons or the Lords would undo everything that was done before, but all awhile liberty for the people beyond the Barons, and Earls and Kings was letting freedom sneak in allowing for a nation to take hold and giving the masses the belief that they are a nation with laws, tradition, and a culture worth preserving. Thus, giving the contemporary people of Hume’s time a sense of self as a nation, out of many: one, e pluribus unum, not just a motto on an American penny until God We Trust made it obscure, but also a way for a citizen to be a member of something bigger than themselves at least within their own minds.
The history as presented in this volume is as good as any for the time period that Hume is considering, this book reads as if was written today, the story being told is a microcosm of other histories such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall except Hume engages the reader with the relevance to who they are today. Oswald Spengler was on to something when he wrote about the morphology of history, that history follows a certain shape as it unfolds across time and civilizations. Of course, Spengler is a fascist and he has a lot of mumbo jumbo superstitious non-sense in his book Decline of the West and he is the inspiration for Hitler and his ilk, and Arnold Toynbee will take it and write more words on a single subject in English than anyone else, but Hume’s story that he is telling is a morphology that fits across time and civilizations too, and Hume presents it here such that it is not only relevant for those who are interested in England, but for those who are interested in history in general.
In the first volume, Hume created the fiction of a people through the perspective of the elite ruling classes, the Anglo-Saxon-Jute-Dane-Norman peoples who ultimately identify as the English people while forgetting the masses and the indigenous inhabitants: the Picts, Scots, Welsh, and Celtic Britons.
In this second volume he is creating a nation, and as we all know a nation must consist of laws, customs and traditions even when the story that is unfolding is a story of a family feud among elite ruling cousins who are striving to control or destroy the other family member ultimately leading to the War of the Roses. Hume is forcing a nationhood on the people as a whole even while the background is often characterized by the capricious and subject to the arbitrary nature of tyrants and conniving folks. Hume does this, in order for the people of his time period to explain who they were in the past within Hume’s frame of reference and his thrownness of his time period. Hume must force a nation on to his exposition because that’s what he has as he is writing and he already knows what the end point must become.
Hume considers almost all religious beliefs from the period of time he is writing about as superstitious magic and sees Papist as controlling and holding the nation down as they from time-to-time foist their near necromancy beliefs where they don’t belong, and don’t even get me started on how according to Hume the Jews have what’s coming to them for their usury and their arrogance and women are not as virtuous as men and tend to be emotional in their thought overall except for the one or two, or maybe it was three women who weren’t, after all, the Anglican perspective of 1760 is clearly the lens that Hume is given as truth and that all the history that he describes must first go through his biases of his thrownness of his time period. All of this just makes this history all the more wonderful as one reads this second volume.
The story of the Scots and their assimilation within the English Kingdoms are told in such a way that they are as good if not better than the English and I had to temporarily pause in order to reflect on why their story was so much better than what was transpiring with the Welsh, than I remember that, of course, Hume is a Scot, an enlightened Scot nevertheless, after all no-true-Scotsman would tell anything but such a story (j/k). Good history story telling needs an attitude and from time-to-time that is what you get within this volume.
The War of the Roses was as amazingly told as the story of Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orleans is presented better than I’ve ever seen elsewhere and Hume puts the context around it and he’ll tell it from a perspective that makes the English Papist out to be in need of manners and a plan. He’ll make the point that the English were never really ever going to be able to permanently occupy the French lands anyways and really needed to adapt to that inevitable disappointment.
Wycliffe gets special mention within Hume’s telling. He and his movement were the first cracks within the dam of superstition and paved the way for the end of those superstitious Papist ultimately leading to the more rational religion of Hume’s readers of 1760 England, at least Hume seems to think so. The only problem, according to Hume, is Wycliffe was just a little bit too much ahead of his time but Hume takes delight in presenting the story regardless. (I’ve always thought of Hume as a deist not a Christian, but from this book, one would conclude that he was a good member in good standing in the Anglican Church).
After every King, the next King, or maybe the House of Commons or the Lords would undo everything that was done before, but all awhile liberty for the people beyond the Barons, and Earls and Kings was letting freedom sneak in allowing for a nation to take hold and giving the masses the belief that they are a nation with laws, tradition, and a culture worth preserving. Thus, giving the contemporary people of Hume’s time a sense of self as a nation, out of many: one, e pluribus unum, not just a motto on an American penny until God We Trust made it obscure, but also a way for a citizen to be a member of something bigger than themselves at least within their own minds.
The history as presented in this volume is as good as any for the time period that Hume is considering, this book reads as if was written today, the story being told is a microcosm of other histories such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall except Hume engages the reader with the relevance to who they are today. Oswald Spengler was on to something when he wrote about the morphology of history, that history follows a certain shape as it unfolds across time and civilizations. Of course, Spengler is a fascist and he has a lot of mumbo jumbo superstitious non-sense in his book Decline of the West and he is the inspiration for Hitler and his ilk, and Arnold Toynbee will take it and write more words on a single subject in English than anyone else, but Hume’s story that he is telling is a morphology that fits across time and civilizations too, and Hume presents it here such that it is not only relevant for those who are interested in England, but for those who are interested in history in general.
July 24, 2020
This Volume, like the 1st, is a great Work of enlightenment. The Author has such powerful tools of representation of people, events, and places as to make graphically comprehensible otherwise complex and vague affairs. Sometimes during the course of reading, I could see, feel, hear, taste, smell ancient England.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews