Colin Kidd: Antidote to Glibness

Colin Kidd

Thirty years ago, well before the advent of Google Street View, I heard about a philosopher invited as a visiting professor to the University of Edinburgh who was thrilled to learn that his office would be in David Hume Tower. Picturing a fortified keep adorned with stepped gables and corbelled turrets, he was sorely disappointed on arrival to discover that the tower was a fourteen-storey Brutalist slab.

The tower has always been controversial. Conservation groups protested in the early 1960s when the university razed some attractive Georgian houses to build it and there were subsequent grumbles that it spoiled the Edinburgh skyline and blocked views of Arthur’s Seat. More recently, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there were demands for the removal of Hume’s name from the building. This was because of a racist footnote Hume added in 1753 to his essay ‘Of National Characters’, first published in 1748. The footnote begins: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white.’ The footnote goes on to discuss the supposed absence of arts, manufactures and sciences among non-white peoples, before ending with a tawdry racist joke: ‘In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.’ Hume’s case wasn’t helped by the recent archival discovery by the historian Felix Waldmann of a letter from 1766 in which Hume advises his patron Lord Hertford to acquire a slave plantation in Grenada.

The naming debate in Edinburgh was tinged with irony. Hume’s alma mater, which had rejected his application for the chair of moral philosophy in 1744-45 before reclaiming him for the university two centuries later, cast him off once more by removing his name from the tower, which was renamed 40 George Square. In response, nine Edinburgh academics, led by Scotland’s most eminent historian, Tom Devine, published an open letter to the principal of the university. What were the implications of this action, they asked, for their colleagues who worked on Hume and had ‘a deep intellectual commitment to his work’? It seemed as if the university regarded their research ‘as dubious or disreputable’. In a further twist, complaints emerged about the building’s supposedly anodyne new name: although George Street, a mile or so away, was named after George III, George Square was apparently named by its architect, James Brown, after his own older brother, George, whose daughter married into one of the biggest plantation-owning families in Scotland.

There is now a burgeoning academic literature on Hume and race. Whereas in the 18th century Hume’s irreligion made him a bogeyman, now it is his views on race that have tarnished his reputation. Most obviously, we observe here the shifting parameters of what a society finds unacceptable. However, behind these controversies lurks a much deeper connection between religion and race. Hume’s remark in the footnote that there are ‘four or five’ different ‘species of men’ and his conclusion that ‘a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men’ point towards polygenism – the belief in the multiple creation of different races. This was one of the most dangerous heresies of Hume’s time. If, as polygenists suggested, humanity as a whole did not descend from Adam and Eve, this not only undermined monogenist orthodoxy but also made nonsense of a central tenet of the Christian scheme of fall and redemption, the biological transmission of original sin. Although we may be familiar with Hobbes’s materialism and Spinoza’s reductive assimilation of God to nature, the argument of the third major heretic of the mid-17th century tends to be forgotten: in Prae-Adamitae (1655), Isaac La Peyrère, a Huguenot from Bordeaux, exploited wrinkles in the Bible to advance the notion that there were men before Adam. According to the historian of philosophy Richard Popkin, La Peyrère was ‘one of the most frequently refuted authors in the period 1655-1800’. Polygenesis was so subversive of core Christian doctrine and so interwoven with daring biblical criticism that even during the Enlightenment it remained a fringe position, held by Voltaire, Hume and, in a semi-camouflaged way, Hume’s kinsman the judge Henry Home, better known as Lord Kames. It is hard today to evaluate a set of arguments which – scrambling our categories of the liberal and the progressive – combines radical disenchantment with Christianity and a belief in profound differentiation between races.

There’s a further problem, as David Womersley notices in his superb scholarly edition of Hume’s Essays. The whole thrust of the argument in ‘Of National Characters’ contradicts ‘the doctrine of racial essentialism’. Hume is at pains in the essay to debunk the assumption that physical causes – ‘qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body’ – shape national differences. He claims instead that the variations we see are largely the result of ‘moral causes’, what we would call, in 21st-century terms, sociological or cultural factors. Yet the racist outburst in the footnote wasn’t a throwaway remark. It was only slightly modified – with the overt polygenism excised, though not the racial prejudice – between its first appearance in 1753 and the final edition of the Essays, overseen by Hume and published in 1777, the year after his death, which provides Womersley’s copy text. The seeming rejection of a unitary origin for mankind sits oddly with Hume’s wider project of constructing what he called a ‘science of man’, an endeavour that rested on the assumed constancy of human nature in ‘its principles and operations’ across ‘all nations and ages’. As well as being objectionable, the footnote remains genuinely puzzling.

It’s discordant, too, that Hume’s name should feature in today’s culture wars since, as Womersley stresses, he consciously used his Essays to modulate the polarised partisanship of his own day. Although the rage of party was at its fiercest in the reign of Queen Anne, between 1702 and 1714, partisan division continued into the Georgian era. During the 1730s, Viscount Bolingbroke, the Tory leader, positioned himself at the head of what became known as the Country movement, which combined Tories with disaffected Whigs, unhappy with Robert Walpole’s regime. Walpolean Whigs insisted on the continuing validity of party distinctions: only true Whigs like themselves, they claimed, could be trusted to uphold the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Hanoverian succession. An enduring culture of partisanship persisted, despite the cross-party contacts and compromises that were the basic fodder of factional intrigue.

Whig mythology was founded on the idea of a contract between crown and people, on the supposed persistence in English history of the liberties that had once underpinned an ancient Anglo-Saxon constitution and on a national self-image that contrasted English freedoms with the miserable subjection experienced under the authoritarian despotisms of continental monarchies such as France. The Tories had their own set of beliefs, centred on Anglican injunctions to passive obedience, which had resulted in a crisis over whether they should back the deposition of James II, whose Catholicism was seen as threatening the Church of England. Hume was not the first writer to use the essay to encourage the tamping down of partisan animosities. The Whig journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele had attempted this in the Spectator, where their fictional portrayal of the genial Tory squire Sir Roger de Coverley was as affectionate as their rendering of the upright Whig merchant Sir Andrew Freeport. This model is manifest in Hume’s Essays, but his strategy for effecting party reconciliation, according to Womersley, aimed at a ‘wholesale disinfection’ of the political nation. In his essays ‘Of the Original Contract’ and ‘Of Passive Obedience’, Hume deconstructed the central components of Whig and Tory political thought respectively. In his essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, he also demonstrated that the supposed differences in personal liberty between ancient self-governing republics and modern monarchies had been much exaggerated.

Hume endorsed Bolingbroke’s argument that party shibboleths belonged to an era that had passed; they were ‘zombie-opinions’, as Womersley calls them, which remained ‘at large’ long after the passing of the late 17th-century conditions under which they had arisen. At the same time, Hume’s position also aligned in some degree with that of the Walpoleans Lord Hervey and William Arnall, who denied that Walpole had corrupted and unbalanced the constitution: liberty wasn’t an inheritance from Anglo-Saxon times but a recent creation, part of the fabric of post-1688 commercial modernity. Yet Walpole himself did not escape Hume’s raillery: echoing Tacitus’ equivocal verdict on the brief reign of the Roman emperor Galba, Hume reckoned that Britain’s first prime minister ‘would have been esteem’d more worthy of his high station, had he never possest it’.

In ‘Of the Original Contract’ and ‘On Passive Obedience’, the reader is immediately struck by Hume’s direct challenge to fundamental Whig and Tory principles, but in many other essays the subversion of party certainties proceeds more subtly. Womersley argues that the ‘unassumingness’ of the essay form ‘disarms’ partisan readers, beguiling them into a ‘suspensive mental posture’ in which they become more receptive to Hume’s glancing insinuations and unobtrusive departures from conventional expectations. Collectively, the essays on politics redirect determined partisans towards a marshy ambivalence.

On some fundamental issues, however, it was impossible to defer judgment. There was the vexed question, for example, of dynastic allegiance. Should the Glorious Revolution and Hanoverian succession be overturned because, as Hume had demonstrated, the contractarian principles of the Whigs were defective? Weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, Hume preferred to stick with the status quo, if for no better reason than a reluctance to dislodge the crust of acceptance which had hardened in the half-century since the revolution. When forced to pick a side, he engaged in a cool calculus of consequences, presenting himself, in the historian Max Skjönsberg’s words, as a ‘balance-sheet Hanoverian’.

Many readers will want to know whether Hume offers solutions for tackling the forms of polarisation so evident in the modern world. Some of us recoil instinctively from the notion that thinkers of the past, who were trapped in their own particular predicaments, can substantively inform the ways we engage with our own; but Hume himself contends in ‘Of Eloquence’ that, even if scientific and cultural developments make one era intrinsically different from another, in politics the ‘stubborn and intractable’ aspects of the human character – ‘interest and ambition, honour and shame, friendship and enmity, gratitude and revenge’ – are ‘the prime movers in all public transactions’ from one age to the next.

Not everything in politics stayed the same, however. Hume noticed that the early modern era had given rise to a new kind of party quite unlike the interest-based factions and personal retinues of earlier ages, one motivated – dangerously so – by ‘abstract speculative principle’. Hume lacked our word ‘ideology’, but this is the phenomenon he had detected. Ideological parties were animated by something akin to religious fervour, ‘erected’, as Womersley notes, ‘into something like confessions’, while ‘dogmas’ supplanted the necessarily ‘limited working hypotheses’ of conventional political practice. But Hume had doubts about how long such zealotry could be sustained. In ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, he identified two different modes of corruption within religion, each of which had unfortunate social consequences: whereas ‘superstition’ induced abasement in its devotees, ‘enthusiasm’ manifested as fanaticism. He reckoned that the anti-social effects of enthusiasm were more dramatic in the short term than those of superstition, but in the longer run fanaticism – thankfully – tended to burn itself out. Hume had witnessed this process at work in the Presbyterianism of his native Scotland, where the militant delirium of the 17th-century Covenanters transmuted by degrees into the moderation of the mid-18th-century kirk establishment.

While the papers on party form the largest group in Hume’s Essays, there are other significant clusters. A few pieces engage with the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, in particular ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, which includes a discussion of slavery. Here Hume notices that the ways in which slaveowners – present as well as past – ‘trample upon human nature’ is ‘sufficient alone to disgust us with that unbounded dominion’. He shared the interest of his friend Adam Smith in political economy, and wrote several essays on economic themes – trade, money, public credit, taxation – whose register Womersley finds more ‘tersely direct’ than the pieces on political questions. An anxious Hume worried that the scale of Britain’s public debt might bring about the state’s collapse, though the crisis he foresaw eventually occurred not in Britain, but across the Channel just before the French Revolution. Four monologues present the lifestyle recommendations of the ancient philosophical schools, with titles evoking the Theophrastian character sketch (‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, ‘The Sceptic’). This group of essays is particularly enigmatic in both form and content. The essays owe a debt to Cicero’s assessment of the ancient philosophical sects in De Finibus, but seem to abandon his conversational format, unless Hume’s four monologues collectively amount to a dialogue. The sceptic is the most likely candidate as a mouthpiece for Hume, but this character warns us off the assumption that the philosopher is a magus who can dispense panaceas – ‘medicine of the mind’ – ‘beyond what can be known by common prudence or discretion’. Or perhaps Hume was questioning the assumption that the philosophies of pagan antiquity can provide a remedy for the ills of Christian Europe. That his Essays functioned as an antidote to glibness and predictable interpretation was a major point of the exercise.

Womersley is a literary scholar, attentive throughout to style and alert to adjustments in tone. Hume fussed over the elegance and propriety of his prose, and did not view form and presentation merely as aesthetic supplements to the philosophical content of his work. As Womersley writes, Montaigne deployed the essay as a ‘scalpel’ for the ‘dissection’ of his own ‘subjectivity’, but the Addisonian essay became a very different tool, used as a ‘chisel’ for ‘shaping’ the opinions of its readers. A self-described ‘ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation’, Hume saw the essay as a means of bringing learning out of a scholastic environment into the ‘conversible’ world. Though most philosophers fillet his work, extracting the meat of his arguments, Hume’s literariness matters. As James Harris, his most historically sensitive interpreter, reminds us in his intellectual biography of Hume, it’s reductive and unhelpful to think of him as a forerunner of today’s professionalised, university-based philosophers. He was instead a man of letters, the author not only of philosophical monographs but also of a multi-volume History of England and a series of dramatic sketches on natural religion, written in literary – as well as philosophical – homage to Cicero. Whatever their significance for philosophers, Hume’s arguments, properly understood, are inseparable from his rhetorical strategies, intertextual playfulness and choice of genre.

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