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can be viewed as “passing” and “inadequate” without therefore being regarded as “illegitimate,” but Livingston suggests that the former implies the latter.³⁷ In fact, Hume would surely agree that the present order is both “passing,” that is, finite and subject to end or change, and “inadequate,” that is, in less than perfect conformity to ethical standards. Given that the standards of Hume’s social and political order were shaped in the context of Christian faith and eschatological hope, it is closer to the truth to say that Hume is the one who is in alienation from these standards. If, as Livingston argues, the present receives its legitimacy from the past, how is it legitimate, on Livingston’s own grounds, for Hume to critique the legitimate Christian moral order? It can appear so only given a sharp distinction between artificial and natural lives, a distinction that has dissolved upon closer examination. Once the bright lines between artificial and natural lives—those between providential and Humean history—begin to fade, we—and Hume—are left with a more complex picture and a more differentiated critical task.

      History as Rhetoric

      Livingston rightly notes that “the providential view of history provides an a priori framework for interpreting historical events.”³⁸ How does this differ from a Humean view of history? Hume often uses the term “true” when speaking of history. History, as we have seen, places objects in their “true point of view” (E 568), it perceives historical actors “in their true colours” (E 566), and historians are “true friends of virtue” (E 567). Nevertheless, while history is not written from some merely relative point of view, neither is it written into the objective structure of the world. Rather, the historical point of view is, in Livingston’s words, the “point of view written into the very idea of history.”³⁹ Once the distinction between natural and artificial lives is dismantled, along with the notion that providential history is a single discrete understanding of history that can be clearly opposed to Hume’s own truly historical understanding, we are left with competing a priori frameworks for interpreting historical events, written into different ideas of history, and constitutive of different forms of community. These can be seen as in partial conformity with the standards that constitute the present social order, and in partial alienation from these standards. A wholly artificial form of life would be self-defeating and unable to sustain itself, just as an utterly alienated historical perspective would be unrecognizable as a historical perspective.⁴⁰ But anything short of this extreme is neither unintelligible nor illegitimate as a historical perspective.

      This is not to deny that Hume is able to offer a critique of various forms of providential history, showing the historical accounts they offer to be wrong or blameworthy. But it is to insist that these must be engaged with substantively and piecemeal, rather than being dismissed a priori on formal grounds. Confronted with accounts of history shaped by Christian eschatology, it is obviously not sufficient to point out that these are alienated from the point of view Hume endorses, nor that Hume is alienated from the point of view endorsed therein. Rather, in critiquing the dominant conventions of his day, Hume must appeal to standards that are present or at least implicit within the society, and point out how they stand in tension with or contradict other commitments. And he must then persuade his readers to retain some of these while dropping incompatible commitments. Because common life is in fact pervaded by contradictions of various kinds, there will always be room for this kind of internal criticism, which preserves us from an immobile conservatism. But since logic by itself cannot determine which of two incompatible commitments should be dropped, criticism is always in part a rhetorical affair.⁴¹

      Is this not what Hume has been up to all along? Surely he uses rhetoric to brand certain forms of life as “artificial” or “barbaric,” certain forms of history as “true,” certain communities as “the party of humankind”? Yes—but insofar as this rhetoric falsely claimed that certain forms of life are beyond the pale of sympathetic understanding, are incoherent or unintelligible in terms of the shared goods of “common life,” it is a rhetoric that can and should be rejected. It is one thing to try to describe one’s own conception of the useful and agreeable in ways that will be attractive and persuasive to others; it is quite another to argue that moral judgments and ways of life that do not align with these particular goods so described are incoherent and unintelligible. We can, in proper Humean fashion, both sympathetically understand Hume’s temptation to do so and find it blameworthy. We are left, then, with something still meaningfully called a philosophy of common life, though no longer with the illusion that this common life neatly excludes popular theistic practices or providential history as artificial or unintelligible, nor that it is particularly unified or determinate.

      There is a lesson to be learned here. Hume’s highly influential History of England, along with his other writings, helped to foster the emergence of a secular historiography that interpreted human history as comprehensible by reference to a variety of psychological and social factors.⁴² Hume’s history was meaningful in terms of a story line that made no reference to God or to an otherworldly destiny. He helped to establish methodological naturalism as the modus operandi of the human sciences.⁴³ Moreover, in a context dominated by competing confessional histories, which privileged one religious group while tending to discount members of other confessions as self-deceived, self-interested, power-hungry, and/or insane, Hume prided himself on offering an impartial account. Hume’s methodological naturalism and his impartiality are not unconnected; because Hume did not think that God was advancing the cause either of Puritans or of Anglo-Catholics, he traced the fortunes of these groups without reference to divine aid or retribution. And because he did not identify with any particular religious “party,” he did not find it difficult to avoid privileging one over the others.

      Naturalism as a methodological postulate, however, can easily give way to what one historian has called “the dogma of metaphysical naturalism.”⁴⁴ Metaphysical naturalism, unlike methodological naturalism, does not hold simply that the tools of historians are capable only of discerning natural causes, but rather asserts that there is no transcendent reality beyond or grounding the natural. The metaphysical naturalist works “in a manner analogous to that of a traditional, religious confessional historian, insofar as one’s analysis relies substantively on one’s own beliefs.”⁴⁵ Such a stance is hardly impartial between religious and nonreligious outlooks. Precisely because it is nonreligious, it fosters a reductionistic approach to religious belief and practice, in which religious phenomena are viewed as properly explained as a function of regularities at some more basic, primary, “real” level. So, for instance, Durkheim believed that the object of worship was in fact society, and he offered a functional analysis of religion as aiding social cohesion. Nor were functionalist and reductionist approaches a passing phenomenon; today, for example, early modern Christianity is widely viewed as “a means of political control and social discipline.”⁴⁶ Yet as we saw earlier, even a naturalist can recognize that descriptivism, the drive to reduce all phenomena to one privileged level of description, can easily distort or wholly lose the very phenomena we wish to understand. Surely the task of historical understanding requires first that we seek to understand what beliefs and practices meant to those who held them and engaged in them. That is, it requires that we capture the level of description at which the agents themselves lived, and recognize that reducing this to some other, purportedly more primary, level of description may well elide precisely the distinctions we desire to have explained. Of course it is possible, even likely, that the historian will encounter instances of insanity, self-deception, and insincerity, and will need to probe beneath the level of description at which an agent purportedly proceeds. It is also possible that the historian will find explanations that proceed at some other level satisfying despite the fact that they lose some of the distinctions relevant to participants. This is because the historian is always mediating between the world as experienced by the subjects of his study and the world as she herself experiences it; the task of translation requires the conceptual apparatus of both.

      What is particularly seductive about Hume’s philosophy of history is that it marries a general commitment to sympathetic understanding—that is just the sort of thick description of the perspectives of historical agents that is in fact needed—with a critique of the artificiality of theistic lives that appears to legitimate making religious belief and practice an exception to the task of sympathetic

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