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David Hume's six-volume History of England (1754-62) links culture to the engines of history in what we would now recognize as a characteristically "liberal" configuration. As Hume puts it, the "arts and commerce [are] the necessary attendants of liberty and equality" as history progresses. (1) Such a three-part harmony of cultural, economic, and political advancement has been frequently postulated, not only in Hume's time but also by eminent contemporary historians, to explain Britain's distinctive achievements in the eighteenth century. In The Pleasures of the Imagination, John Brewer quotes one of Hume's characteristic statements of the view and affirms that "recent historical research bears [it] out": "Liberty and the rule of law," Brewer concludes, "which protected property, were the handmaidens of commerce which, in turn, helped the liberal and fine arts flourish." (2) This principle defines for Hume the enlightenment of his own age as it constitutes the logic of history's development toward it--a logic never neglected through the History, even while it attends to the surface ironies, anachronistic details, the anticipations and regressions punctuating England's progress from the pre-Christian era to 1688. Beyond its account of English history's distinctive telos, then, Hume's work offers a signal instance of the master narrative, the grand recit, the "Enlightenment history" that has remained a target of poststructuralist critique and historicist literary critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher. (3)
The History's progressive scheme is consistently complicated, however, by the role played in it by cultural advancement--by the "refinement" of what Hume variously calls "the arts and sciences," "polite learning," or "taste and judgment." Taste factors an anomaly into Hume's History that renders its very status as a comprehensive, enlightened narrative problematic. Unlike the progress of liberty or commerce, polite learning's refinement leads Hume to reflect on the complexity of his own position as both a refined writer and a refined product of history.
This self-reflexive irony has a number of important implications for contemporary debates about the nature of the Enlightenment's historical view of itself and the relationship between literature and history in general. Often poststructuralist critics have portrayed the Enlightenment as a battle between certain privileged terms--reason, theoretical understanding, universality, abstraction--and their opposites: contingency, recalcitrant particularity, "the touch of the real" (in Greenblatt and Gallagher's phrase) just beyond our theoretical grasp. (4) Enlightenment history accordingly narrates the triumph in the course of events of the dichotomy's preferred half over its underprivileged one, or at least demonstrates the historian's own conceptual mastery over a welter of instances that would otherwise seem chaotic or random. It has seemed almost inevitable that contemporary critics, however sophisticated, maintain the dichotomy themselves. Critiquing the Enlightenment, they often simply invert its values, arguing that all significant challenges to Enlightenment theory must historically emerge from the "dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway," in Terry Eagleton's words. (5) If we seek the limits or shortcomings of Enlightenment history and thought in general, surely they will be found in an inability to deal with this "other" terrain.
The typical understanding of the historical role of literature and aesthetics in such conceptual schemes reflects this polarity. Either aesthetic discourse aids the Enlightenment project of rationalization, using, e.g., literature's considerable subtlety and responsiveness to particularity to help reason conquer the "dense, swarming territory," or it finds itself aligned with otherness, making fugitive gestures that expose the limitations and blindness of all myths of progress and theoretical comprehension. In works such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (6) it has been common to view literature as supporting one or the other of these starkly opposed agendas, and Greenblatt and Gallagher's book reaffirms New Historicism's orientation of truly radical literary scholarship toward an appreciation of the inassimilable historical nuances, the blind alleys, and so on, that disrupt the logic of the grand recit.
The present account finds in Hume an alternative to this whole way of thinking about Enlightenment history and literature's role in it. As we shall see, Hume takes the accidental details of history and the passions that produce them as grist for his theoretical mill, not as occult challenges to it--not surprisingly, since such oppositions are foundational for Enlightenment thought. A current of counter-Enlightenment appears in the History of England not when its narrative coherence founders on details it cannot comprehend but rather when it ironically reveals the collapse of the dichotomies on which Enlightenment discourse is supposedly founded. The term I use for this collapse, "counter-Enlightenment," is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who applies it to the thought of various anti-Enlightenment writers--and indeed shows how writers such as Johann Georg Hamann turned elements of Hume's philosophy against its overt intellectual purpose. (7) My application of the idea to Hume is somewhat different. Hume's historical writing both erects the binary logic commonly ascribed to Enlightenment history and points to the places where it breaks down. This view complicates a reading not merely of Hume's historical writing but of Enlightenment history itself, inasmuch as it would be difficult to find a better, more widely read exemplar of the genre in English than the History of England. The present account seeks to move beyond the practice, common in both positive and negative portrayals of the period, of judging writers and works by determining which side of some fundamental Enlightenment opposition they are on. Rather it identifies the collapse of oppositions as a source of Hume's critical and historical power.
The observation that such collapses occur in the History especially when it assesses the historical role of literature and the arts is intended to make a further polemical point. Too often, recent discussion has polarized its sense of literature's role in history. If literature's critical, reflective power is not to be seen as always already co-opted by the hegemonic designs of power/knowledge, it must somehow discover a pure place for itself (however flickeringly and impotently) apart from these designs and beyond their reach. (8) Hume's historical writing offers an alternative to this familiar impasse. In Hume's scheme, literary culture is deeply embedded in an obviously ideological program, supporting a particular view of political and economic progress that gives meaning to England's development. But its very embeddedness within liberal ideology perfectly places it to demonstrate the limits of the justifications of liberalism. Literature is hence historically interesting neither because of the especially subtle ideological services it performs nor because of its unique capacity to resist co-optation by ideology. It instead represents the irony emerging when the learned, refined understanding is seen as both thoroughly conditioned by historical processes and responsible for understanding them.
One sophisticated analysis that ascribes a sort of binary tension to Hume's overall project is Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career by Jerome Christensen. Though not interested in the History of England to any significant degree, the book begins with an account of Hume's essay, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," which has often been seen as anticipating the History's philosophical program. (9) The essay's opening paragraphs, according to Christensen, conduct "Hume to the brink of 'chance' or 'secret or unknown causes,' where the inquirer teeters at the limit of intelligibility, that edge where the historical understanding verges on breakdown." (10) Hume then rescues "historical understanding" by bringing such distressing details under a more generally coherent interpretive scheme: thus, Christensen says, "Serenity is restored." (11) For Christensen, the passage represents the nervous desire of Hume, and perhaps of the Enlightenment in general, to conquer the unknown with reason.
But several elements of Hume's passage tell against Christensen's notion that its drama lies in the opposition between understanding and chance, explanation and mysterious particularities. For one thing, Christensen neglects to take seriously the essay's strong distinction between the history of the arts and sciences on one hand and political and economic history on the other. The former is especially difficult, Hume says, because the arts and...
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