Andrew Sabl has written an exceptionally fine overview of David Hume’s History of England, a work whose six volumes has discouraged a wider readership. At the same time, Hume has not been regarded primarily as a political theorist. His thoughts on politics are known from the larger philosophical works or scattered in essays difficult to obtain without Eugene Miller’s great anthology. Among philosophers Hume is a staple, but their interest rarely strays from the Treatise, the Enquiry, and the Dialogues. The History into which Hume poured such brilliance remains an undiscovered continent. Without the work of scholars like Donald Livingston and others we might not even suspect its value. But with Sabl’s full-length study, we can say that it has finally been mapped.

The principal merit of Hume’s Politics is not that Sabl provides us with a synopsis but that he situates the History in relation to Hume’s overall philosophical project. It is the elusiveness of the latter that really is the source of Hume’s neglect in political theory. He is notoriously difficult to pin down, for he is an empiricist who extends empiricism into its skeptical conclusion. He is a conservative who resists the nihilistic implications of his own philosophical outlook, counseling due regard for custom and convention. In this way, he veers toward a defense of liberal and constitutional regimes while kicking away the props of a state of nature and a social contract. In terms of religion, he remains an unrepentant agnostic. None of this bodes well for a political theory accustomed to beginning with human nature or divine command.

What makes the History of interest is that Hume follows the self-construction of a political order without reference to preconceptions. History is made, Hume understood and Sabl points out, before human beings have time to think about it. Even John Stuart Mill took note of the capacity of Americans to “improvise a government.” Theoretically, this nontheoretical approach to politics has been most fully elaborated by Michael Oakeshott. Sabl’s study is the next phase in this prioritization of practice as he looks at one of the earlier exemplars. Hume fits the bill perfectly since his philosophical reflections seem to lead nowhere, while his insights into the practical emergence of order display an impressive coherence. It will be difficult for scholars to neglect this perspective on Hume in light of Sabl’s groundbreaking study.

The author has shown how Hume understood a process of emergence that was largely invisible to the protagonists and that escapes theoretical penetration. Initially, one is inclined to dismiss Hume’s appeal to custom and convention as a mere placeholder for the inaccessible. This is the point at which wistfulness for an original contract, however implausible, begins to take over. But Sabl demonstrates that Hume had gone beyond such subterfuge. He understood that convention and the allegiance that derives from it depends on nothing more than itself. No prior agreement is needed because none could be more reliable than what has already proved its reliability within life. The genesis of political order carries its genealogy within it. The narrative is not a reductive return to an original state in which all that has been built up is stripped away. It is instead the story of the gradual accretion of authority and allegiance as they demonstrate their worth in actual practice. The English constitution rests on the order it has made possible and derives support from the consensus it has forged. There is no moment of pure consent outside of the history that makes it possible to exercise consent.

To explain this conception, Sabl frames Hume’s account within contemporary “coordination theory,” the mechanism by which players in a game make decisions in light of what they expect other players to do. No doubt this could be a useful suggestion and dresses the argument in contemporary garb. However, it is to Sabl’s credit that he largely dispenses with the game-theoretical element when he enters upon his examination of the text. One is inclined to suggest that Hume’s theory of convention may be the wider setting for game theory itself. After all, no game can contain the rule of following its rules. Besides, Sable confronts an even bigger challenge in distilling Hume’s massive work to an analysis of 247 pages of text. This is a difficulty he surmounts by focusing on the turning points in which the English constitution is successively elaborated. Like all good historians, Hume does not merely recount what occurred. He highlights its significance.

Sabl closely follows Hume’s analysis in which the clarification of principle is the fruit of historical struggle. The story is one of “enlargement” by which human beings come to take a wider view of the world than what merely concerns them. At one level this would appear to be an advance in virtue, but Sabl and Hume point out that it is acquired indirectly. Exhortation to virtue is less reliable than the more unconscious process by which it converges with self-interest rightly understood. The obstreperous barons who prized their independence are taught to enjoy a liberty under law that is more secure when guaranteed by a monarch. In the process, the two indispensable elements are built up without explicit debate or agreement. Hereditary monarchy and its restraint in the Magna Carta are the pillars on which a constitutional regime is erected. From there the benefits are extended into wider circles by which the whole realm is eventually integrated into it.

Sabl is thus a close and sympathetic reader of Hume’s great work of political reflection. That is the distinguishing feature of the study and also its only notable limitation. He hews so closely to his subject that he does not always confront the questions he himself raises. Thus, he admits that Hume’s insistence on the authority of “fundamental conventions” is striking: “It finds little support in Hume’s philosophical works, only in the less familiar History” (p. 122). But Sabl then simply takes the History as the dispositive statement. He neither charges Hume with inconsistency nor accuses him of error. A more capacious reading would suggest that if the History is Hume’s final political thought, then the reading of the philosophical works would have to be revised accordingly. This is one of the big implications of Sabl’s study that remains largely unexploited. Even within the History the discrepancy between the terminology and its content intrudes. Thus, Hume rejects the language of virtue but he highlights the case of the six Calais burghers whose sacrifice Edward III requires. As a consequence of their voluntary self-surrender, they gain a heroic stature that, as Hume admits, far outclasses any attainments of the nobility.

One has to wonder if the terminology of convention adequately captures action that surpasses what any convention could command or compensate. Convention and allegiance may furnish the public formulation, but virtue and the growth of the soul may still be its truth. The supererogatory is beyond the politics that depends upon it.