Hume, History, and the Uses of Sympathy

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4495758
AutoresAdam Sutcliffe (0009-0006-8342-0140, King's College London, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen62
Número1
Páginas62-87
Fecha de publicación2023-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/hith.12288
OpenAlexW4321375476
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas7

This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754-1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others' feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers' emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering-such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots-while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers' sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence

Aesthetics · Antipathy · Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sympathy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Social Psychology