|
|
|
Reviews of Books
| Hume's
Reception in Early America, 2 volumes. Edited with introductions
by MARK G. SPENCER.
(Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes Press, distributed by the University of
Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xxvi, 278; xxii, 291. $265.00.)
Reviewed by Adam Potkay
, College of William and Mary
|
|
The year 1810 can stand as the terminus ad quem for extant scholarship on David Hume's influence on American thought. In that year (on August 12), Jefferson wrote an often-cited letter to William Duane castigating Hume's History of England as "poison," a contagion that "has spread universal toryism over the land"; this perception of Hume as an arrière garde force in the early republic effectively placed him beneath the radar of subsequent progressivist history. Analyses of Hume's influence have centered on the 1770s and 1780s and have in general subscribed to Douglass Adair's image of Hume as a proto-Federalist, inspiring Madison's and Hamilton's conception of an extended federal republic.1 This reviewer has offered the counterargument that it was as an advocate of classical republicanism that Hume most influenced the intellectual and political life of the revolutionary period and the early republic, both immediately through his often-reprinted essay "Of Eloquence" and mediated through Hugh Blair's discussion of political oratory in lectures 25–27 of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and through America's first comprehensive set of lectures on rhetoric as a civic art, John Quincy Adams's Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, delivered at Harvard College between 1806 and 1809 and published in 1810.2 Whether Hume is seen as a Federalist or an Antifederalist, however, his significance after 1810 has never to my knowledge been addressed. |
1
|
|
Mark Spencer's important new collection of primary materials, Hume's Reception in Early America, amply demonstrates Hume's continued relevance to political, aesthetic, philosophical, and religious debates in America through at least 1850. Spencer's volumes, sure to be of interest to scholars of Scottish as well as American intellectual and cultural history, attest not only to the continuing significance of Hume and other later eighteenth-century Edinburgh luminaries of academic and literary life, from Boston to Charleston, through the first half of the nineteenth century, but also to how variegated, rich, and interesting some now-forgotten corners of that life could be. |
2
|
|
Spencer culls his references to and discussions of Hume and his works mainly from American periodicals, ranging from the relatively well known (The Port Folio, The North American Review) to the decidedly obscure (for example, The Ordeal, published in Boston weekly between January and July 1809). A small percentage of Spencer's selections (roughly one-seventh) are drawn from eighteenth-century pamphlets and from nineteenth-century scholarly books. The two volumes of Hume's Reception in Early America contain, in total, eighty-seven separate items, ranging in length from short paragraphs to one ample—and rewarding—seventy-three-page excerpt from Frederick Beasley's A Search of Truth in the Science of the Human Mind (Philadelphia, 1822). All were originally published between 1758 and 1850, but the lion's share—seventy-one items, or 82 percent of the total—comes from the nineteenth century.3 |
. . . |
There are about 2454 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
