Читать книгу David Hume - Mark G. Spencer - Страница 12

Three

“THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY”: HISTORICAL CAUSATION AND POLITICAL RHETORIC IN THE AGE OF HUME

Philip Hicks

In his History of England (1754–62), David Hume routinely used such phrases as “the spirit of independency” and “the spirit of opposition” (H 5:147, 6:387), commonplace language for eighteenth-century Britain. The notion that a person or collectivity might possess a “spirit” or distinguishing characteristic connected to a larger climate of opinion immediately calls to mind Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748).¹ Yet such language actually predated Montesquieu and was comparatively new to British historical writing when Hume applied it to his account of the British civil wars. Hume adopted the phrase “the spirit of liberty” as a key explanatory device in his History, convenient shorthand for a combination of political and religious ideals that motivated Britons to oppose what they perceived to be excessive monarchical power. Hume plucked this term from the world of partisan politics and redefined it as part of a larger project promoting political moderation. Yet we shall see that choosing to deploy such a multivalent rhetoric had ironic consequences for his narrative. One of Hume’s goals was to write an utterly secular account of the English past, but using “the spirit of liberty” according to the grammatical rules set forth by its progenitor, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, actually made it resemble providence to a startling degree.² In a further irony, while Hume wanted to defuse this highly charged slogan, his own extensive use of the term only made it more popular, especially as a way of understanding political upheaval, past and present. On both sides of the Atlantic, Hume’s History helped to shape the vocabulary used to explain the seventeenth-century British and eighteenth-century American and French revolutions.³

Given Hume’s penchant for “the spirit of liberty,” it is perhaps surprising to locate its intellectual origins in a Machiavellian tradition that ran counter to Hume’s conviction that institutions and laws are more powerful determinants of a nation’s political well-being than the manners and morals of its leaders.⁴ During the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s study of the ancient republics convinced him that liberty in a republic could best be preserved not so much by adjusting the institutional machinery of government as by ensuring that the value of political liberty was nurtured in the people as a whole. Such a perspective emphasized structural and impersonal factors such as the spirit of the times and public opinion and imagined the polity as possessing its own characteristics and desires.⁵ In Britain, Machiavelli’s analysis influenced “Country” political groups that developed in the 1690s to defend parliamentary independence against encroaching executive power. These “True” or “Old” Whigs relied heavily on the political writings of such “Commonwealthmen” as James Harrington, Edmund Ludlow, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Toland. In many cases, these thinkers were more concerned that the ethos of liberty be preserved than whether the actual form of government was a republic or a monarchy. It was in this ideological context that the expression “the spirit of liberty” was coined. Ludlow’s Memoirs of the civil wars, written in the 1660s and redacted by Toland, twice referred to this “spirit” as an opponent of Oliver Cromwell’s despotic actions.⁶

By the time the Memoirs were published in 1698, the phrase had begun to enter the lexicon of the British political class. In that year, a precocious nineteen-year-old, whose future as a Tory secretary at war and later a Jacobite secretary of state still lay ahead of him, wrote a letter to his mentor Sir William Trumbull. Henry St. John stated that whereas patriotism and “zeal for liberty” were once “imprinted on our hearts,” the opposite values now held sway in Britain. St. John traced those traditional political virtues to the Romans. Even after ancient Britain threw off the Romans’ legal system, he noted, “their divine spirit (if I might use the expression) shed its influence on us.” After making this distinction between laws and their “spirit,” and citing republican tags from Tacitus, Cicero, and Horace, St. John went on to observe that liberty-loving people had historically been enslaved not by force of arms but by the corruption of manners. He gave the Greek example of Cyrus, who failed to pacify the Lidians militarily because “the spirit of Liberty crost his designs, and stopt the course of his victories.”⁷ The spirit of liberty, as St. John viewed it, was thus more powerful than armies or laws; it was a god-like, “divine” influence; it was republican. These were the germs of a concept St. John would fully develop thirty years later and eventually bequeath to Hume.

During those years “the spirit of liberty” was occasionally mentioned in British political writings, essays, and histories.⁸ Yet, as in the case of St. John’s letter, it rarely appeared more than once in any given work; it was not deployed systematically in any purposeful way until St. John, now Lord Bolingbroke, mounted a decade-long political campaign, beginning in 1725, against the Whig regime of Sir Robert Walpole. To unite his coalition of fellow Tories and disaffected Whigs, Bolingbroke had to justify the very idea of political opposition and refute the charge that he was raising a treasonous “faction” of the sort that caused the civil wars. This was the goal of the Remarks on the History of England, twenty-four essays he published under the pseudonym Humphrey Oldcastle between September 1730 and May 1731 in his paper The Craftsman. Here Bolingbroke tried turning the tables on his opponents by pinning the label of “faction” on them. Drawing from Renaissance humanism’s preoccupation with internal faction as the enemy of liberty and its technique of dividing history into good and evil periods based on republican criteria,⁹ Bolingbroke went through English history showing how “the spirit of liberty” had always supported the national interest in the face of the self-interested “spirit of faction” that Walpole’s Court Whigs now fomented.¹⁰ England had the trappings of liberty, Bolingbroke argued, but Walpole’s placemen, pensions, and bribes corrupted its political institutions, which were free in name only. The spirit of liberty alone could give life to the institutions of liberty, the English laws and system of government. Resuscitating the “Country” platform, Bolingbroke cited Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy as the source of this distinction between external constitutional forms and the true spirit of a government. To illustrate his point, he explained: “As losing the spirit of liberty lost the liberties of Rome, even while the laws and constitutions, made for the preservation of them, remained entire; so we see that our ancestors, by keeping this spirit alive and warm, regained all the advantages of a free government, tho a foreign invasion [by William the Conqueror] had destroyed them, in great measure, and had imposed a very tyrannical yoke on the nation.”¹¹

In this passage, “the spirit of liberty” described the preconditions for genuine liberty. Yet elsewhere in the Remarks, more interestingly, Bolingbroke endowed it with an agency all its own. He made it the subject of his sentences and paired it with active verbs. The spirit of liberty now “enacted” Roman laws; “prevailed” to secure Magna Carta; “exerted itself” in favor of Edward III; “diffused itself” through nobles, clergy, and commoners; “preserved” the constitution during the Wars of the Roses; “rose” to resist James I; and “baffled” his plans to wage war on the people.¹² In the process of anthropomorphizing this concept, Bolingbroke underscored its republican character. His adjectives describing the spirit of liberty as “generous” and “disinterested” indicated its public spiritedness; “vigorous” and “active” its aggressive political virtue (virtù); “watchful,” “jealous,” and “easily alarmed” its eternal vigilance.¹³ More explicitly than its Machiavellian and Commonwealth sources, Bolingbroke’s rhetoric depicted liberty not simply as the product of human creativity but as possessing its own creative powers. This idea of liberty received further elaboration from another member of Bolingbroke’s circle, James Thomson. Inspired by the Remarks as well as classical mythology, Thomson traced the spirit of liberty to its ultimate source in the goddess of liberty. Thomson’s poem Liberty (1735–36) credited this deity with “infusing” nations with “her spirit.” This divine aid, “the Spirit of Liberty,” was what enabled humans to love their country. Thomson thus brought to the surface what had always been a latent meaning of “spirit,” a deity’s power to create, animate, or inspire, a role not unlike that played by the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. Between them, Thomson and Bolingbroke had elevated liberty to a position above the human mortals on whom it might bestow or withdraw its favor.¹⁴

_____________

By incanting it hundreds of times as a centerpiece of his propaganda war, Bolingbroke gave “the spirit of liberty” currency in Anglophone political culture. More than ever before, it resonated in parliamentary speeches, political journalism, and private correspondence.¹⁵ It now also began to appear in the writings of David Hume. Hume first cut his teeth as a political thinker observing the titanic struggle between Bolingbroke and Walpole. His earliest political essays criticized Bolingbroke’s violent partisanship and basic premise that under Walpole, crown patronage had endangered the constitution. Nonetheless, Hume co-opted Bolingbroke’s virulent language to help him conceptualize the English past. In his essay “Of the Parties of Great Britain” (1741), to compress into a few sentences the essential dynamic of the British civil wars, Hume imagined two entities that each “arose” and then collided: “an ambitious, or rather a misguided, prince” (King Charles I) and “the spirit of liberty” (E 68). Thirteen years later, Hume would adopt the same terminology to carry out his full-scale treatment of the same subject in The History of England. As early as 1741, then, writing in the waning days of Walpole’s regime, Hume had already picked up this phrase and used it in the manner of Bolingbroke.¹⁶ This usage, coming seven years before the publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), strongly suggests that Hume first encountered the concept in Opposition, not French, discourse. In other words, there was an English genealogy for this particular term from which Hume was drawing that ran back at least as far as Ludlow or Bolingbroke in 1698 and more immediately to the latter’s essays in 1730–31. Montesquieu’s magnum opus used a term translated as “spirit of liberty” (un esprit de liberté) in the two Bolingbrokean senses of an active force in history and a republican political culture. An earlier work, Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Romans’ Greatness and Decline (1734), also employed this term.¹⁷ These writings, together with Voltaire’s Essay on Manners (1754–56), accustomed Europeans to speaking in terms of the esprit of nations and helped to invent the genre of philosophical history. Yet, interestingly, the historical thinking that informed Hume’s Essays and History was largely independent of these models.¹⁸

Hume’s source for “the spirit of liberty” was a polemical historical commentary in letter form, Bolingbroke’s Remarks, not the French philosophes or the formal histories of England that preceded Hume’s. Those histories by Thomas Carte, William Guthrie, James Ralph, Laurence Echard, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, White Kennett, and the first Earl of Clarendon portrayed events chiefly as the deeds of individual “great” men. Sometimes they discerned larger patterns of causation and highlighted the actions of “the people” or of divine providence. More occasionally, they used the formula “the spirit of” some idea, value, or feeling with which historical actors were imbued—faction, independence, jealousy, and so on.¹⁹ In only a handful of instances, however, did they mention “the spirit of liberty.”²⁰ In sum, this “spiritual” form of historical causation was not a common element in English historical writing before Hume made it so.

Hume’s main purpose in adopting the concept of “the spirit of liberty”²¹ was to explain the political catastrophe of the 1640s. The History expanded on the thesis of his 1741 essay to depict the British civil wars as a showdown between the spirit of liberty and early Stuart monarchy. By Hume’s reckoning, Charles I was tragically overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with this formidable opponent:

Unhappily, his fate threw him into a period, when the precedents of many former reigns favoured strongly of arbitrary power, and the genius of the people ran violently towards liberty. And if his political prudence was not sufficient to extricate him from so perilous a situation, he may be excused. . . . [T]he high idea of his own authority, which he had imbibed, made him incapable of giving way to the spirit of liberty, which began to prevail among his subjects. (H 5:543, 221)

Charles had inherited this political predicament from his father, James, who encountered the nascent spirit of liberty soon after his accession. James’s first parliament “showed more spirit of liberty than appeared among his bishops and theologians” at the Hampton Court Conference, Hume observed (H 5:13). A few pages later, Hume noted that “this watchful spirit of liberty . . . appeared in the commons” to challenge royal judicial authority in the Goodwin electoral case (H 5:17). To account for this newfound spirit, Hume embarked upon one of the History’s famous digressions: “About this period, the minds of men, throughout Europe, especially in England, seem to have undergone a general, but insensible revolution,” Hume wrote. The new learning, improved arts, and increased travel resulted in a “universal fermentation” in which “the ideas of men enlarged themselves on all sides” and “the love of freedom . . . acquired new force” (H 5:18). “This rising spirit” (H 5:19) could just be glimpsed in the previous reign, when one might “observe the faint dawn of the spirit of liberty among the English, the jealousy with which that spirit was repressed by the sovereign, the imperious conduct which was maintained in opposition to it, and the ease with which it was subdued by this arbitrary princess” (H 4:138). Analyzing Elizabethan political life, Hume again pared history down to its bare essentials, pitting the personal skills of a single monarch against the impersonal forces of the spirit of liberty. By contrast with Elizabeth’s masterful response to the challenges presented by this new political reality, James “possessed neither sufficient capacity to perceive the alteration, nor sufficient art and vigour to check it in its early advances” (H 5:19). Although the spirit of liberty drew sustenance from deep-rooted intellectual, economic, and social changes in English society, its triumph over James and Charles was, therefore, by no means inevitable, provided these rulers possessed the political acumen and resolution to repress or accommodate it.

At James’s accession, that spirit animated comparatively few Englishmen, Hume pointed out: “the principles of liberty . . . were, as yet, pretty much unknown to the generality of the people.” Only in the work of “men of genius and of enlarged minds” such as Francis Bacon and Edwin Sandys did a “spirit of liberty” appear (H 5:550). By 1610, however, this growing force had spread, and Hume used it to explain the decisive shift in attitude articulated in the Commons’ remonstrance against James’s new impositions: “A spirit of liberty had now taken possession of the house: The leading members . . . less aspired at maintaining the ancient constitution, than at establishing a new one, and a freer, and a better” (H 5:42). In 1614, the new “house of commons showed rather a stronger spirit of liberty than the foregoing” (H 5:58). By 1626, Hume announced, “the spirit of liberty was universally diffused,” and it accounted for the unprecedented challenge to the crown posed by the Five Knights’ case (H 5:179). In the course of a generation, then, this spirit had spread from a few men to the entire House of Commons, thence to England at large, and finally to Scotland (H 5:257). It approached a saturation point in 1640, when Charles’s attempts to impose forced loans were “repelled by the spirit of liberty, which was now become unconquerable” (H 5:278). So complete was this triumph that in 1642, even the king’s own party “breathed the spirit of liberty,” as its support was conditioned upon his submission to “a legal and limited government” (H 5:394). At this point in the History, the spirit of liberty virtually disappears.²² It had served its two primary functions: registering the comparative extent of opposition to the crown at any given moment and illustrating how a change in intellectual climate precipitated the demise of Stuart monarchy. Because Hume saw the contest for liberty primarily in terms of political processes, not armed struggle, the spirit of liberty appeared in the run-up to the civil wars, but not the battles themselves.