Religion, Revolution, and Individualism in Hume’s History of England

• In Event: Hume and the "Vulgar": Commercial Citizens in the Global Eighteenth Century

Abstract

David Hume’s works are written for readers with the virtues of the commercial republic: politeness, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest. Yet the vaunted sociability of commercial republicanism is misleading about the roots of liberal modernity. The outlook of the modern individual required a wrenching social, psychological, and political revolution, as described in Hume’s History of England. In this paper I examine Hume’s account of this revolution with a view to shedding light on the roots of modern individualism. I find that the ancestor of the bourgeois individual, in Hume’s view, is the fanatical enthusiast of the English Civil Wars, and I speculate on why Hume thought that enthusiasm was an indispensable ingredient in the modern revolution. Enthusiasm, it seems, was needed to overcome the power of divine right monarchy, itself needed to overcome the power of the papacy. At the origins of individualism, I suggest, lies the religious issue.

Author

• Thomas Merrill, American University