Faction Detected: The Machiavellian Milieu behind “Of Parties in General”

Hume wrote his moral and political essays in a charged partisan environment where Machiavelli was frequently invoked. I begin with a brief exploration into this context to better understand Hume's intended contribution to this debate, and the relevance of Machiavelli for this contribution.Footnote ¹⁸ The first volume of Hume's essays appeared in Edinburgh in the summer of 1741, followed six or seven months later by a second.Footnote ¹⁹ In Hume's prefatory advertisement, he writes that the essays were written “with a View of being published as Weekly-Papers, and were intended to comprehend the Designs” of the popular forums for political debate, the “Spectators & Craftsman,” and were to handle topics of “Party-Rage” with “Moderation and Impartiality.”Footnote ²⁰ Hume's choice of epigraph for the Essays reflects the salience of party division: the same line from the Aeneid that was found in the epigraph to Addison's Spectator, no. 126, an essay on party rage from decades before.Footnote ²¹ The reader would not be surprised by the topic, as the essays were published at the climax of the debate over the king's minister, Robert Walpole. Walpole had used the patronage and influence of the crown to ensure that a significant portion of those sitting in Parliament had an interest in supporting his wishes, thus creating a “Court” faction dependent on the Crown, against which the opposition “Country” party formed, condemning Walpole for this apparent constitutional corruption and for the absence of public virtue which fostered it. Hume would contribute to this debate with the novelty of being scientific and politically neutral,Footnote ²² a posture that led him to reject many of the prevailing views within this debate. In “Of Parties in General,” as we will see, Hume writes against the view that saw faction as uniquely dangerous and incompatible with balanced constitutional politics, a principled view that was understood to rest in part on Machiavelli's Discourses.

Hume's condemnation of principled parties was uncommon for a time that was beginning to distinguish “parties” from what Cato called “a factious combination for preferment and power.”Footnote ²³ Throughout that century, “party was for most men tolerable only when it embodied principle and so was capable of virtue; two parties representing different particular interests would perpetuate the reign of corruption and fantasy.”Footnote ²⁴ This was particularly the case for those out of power and opposed to the king's administration. In The Craftsman, the periodical of record for the Opposition, we find multiple examples: “By Party … was always meant a national Division of Opinions … for the benefit of the whole Community… . I conceive a Faction to be a Set of Men arm'd with Power, and acting upon no one Principle of Party, or any Notion of Publick Good.”Footnote ²⁵ Soon after “Of Parties in General,” a man named John Perceval deserted the principled Opposition to join the ministry, and felt the need to write Faction Detected, a “clever, but cynical justification” for his self-interested move.Footnote ²⁶ Those remaining in the principled opposition responded with the Detector Detected, and attacked Perceval's mental gymnastics in part by relying on the toleration or opprobrium attached to accepted definitions: “A Party is, when a great Number of Men join together in professing a Principle, or set of Principles, which they take to be for the publick Good… . Faction again is, when a Number of Men unite together for their own private advantage.” Thus a “Partyman, properly so called, may be a very honest man.”Footnote ²⁷

Similar themes singling out “faction” for abuse can be seen from the chief party thinker of the time and Hume's most explicit target in the Essays, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.Footnote ²⁸ Bolingbroke's chief claim was that distinctions of principle ceased following the settlement of 1688, and any divisions that remained were factious and condemnable.Footnote ²⁹ Thus Bolingbroke tells us that the Court party that rallied behind Walpole was nothing more than a faction for “power, profit, or protection,” and “it is in that our greatest and almost our whole danger centres.”Footnote ³⁰ On the other hand, Bolingbroke's Country party was “formed on principles of common interest,” and was thus a “party,” understood as “the nation, speaking and acting in the discourse and conduct of particular men.”Footnote ³¹

Given Machiavelli's considerable influence on English political thought,Footnote ³² it is unsurprising to see Machiavelli being cited on both sides of these party debates. Frequently cited is Discourses 3.1, where “Machiavel tells us, that no government can long subsist, but by recurring often to its first principles.”Footnote ³³ In the Craftsman we find that “liberty” is best secured by “preserving this constitution inviolate, or by drawing it back to the principles on which it was originally founded, whenever it shall be made to swerve from them.”Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, the Court party's London Journal argued that “it is necessary once in an age or two, to make a noble stand and bring governments back to their first principles.”Footnote ³⁵ What is precisely meant by “first principles” depends on which party you ask, but it was understood by both to refer to the balance of the British constitution, which realized an ideal of a mixed regime that was understood to be Machiavellian in pedigree. In the Discourses Machiavelli echoes Polybius in teaching that the “brevity of life in the three good” regimes can be counteracted by incorporating features of all three, thus preventing the damaging excesses of each, “for the one guards the other, since in one and the same city there are the principality, the aristocrats, and the popular government” (DL 1.2.5).Footnote ³⁶ This teaching, resurrected and revised by Harrington's Oceana, Footnote ³⁷ can be found throughout the Augustan age, in both Court and Country arguments.Footnote ³⁸

The party debate at the time thus concerned the constitution or the proper way one is supposed to understand and maintain the constitution. For Bolingbroke, a proper application of the Polybian-Machiavellian balance was essential for understanding why Walpole was so dangerous. Bolingbroke's argument rested on a narrow conception of institutional corruption: by influencing the interests of its members, Walpole had violated the independence of Parliament by which the constitutional balance was purportedly maintained. The balance was previously secure through the ownership of property, by which members of Parliament had independent power and could stand against the wishes of the Crown. But the new economy of credit and stock-jobbing created money independent of the propertied gentry, and thus weakened the mechanism by which the Parliament could check the court—calling into question the entire constitutional scheme.Footnote ³⁹ Bolingbroke's genius lay in clothing this argument in the venerable language of republican civic virtue. By arguing that liberty was secure only by way of a particular constitutional arrangement, the concept of public virtue could be narrowly redefined to mean merely “the disposition to support a balanced constitution.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus Bolingbroke could paint Walpole as corrupt and corrupting without even considering the effects of constitutional change, for if Walpole violated the constitutional balance and was not thrown out of office, then one could conclude that his corrupt practices had enervated the public spirit required of a free people.Footnote ⁴¹ Though this concept of virtue is only nominally related to what we find in the Discourses, Footnote ⁴² Bolingbroke gilds his cause with the name of “Machiavel,” citing Discourses 1.17 to account for how a “wise and brave people” may “sink into sloth and luxury.”Footnote ⁴³

In short, at the time Hume publishes “Of Parties in General,” the attentive reader would not have found a reference to Machiavelli in a critical essay on factions and parties all that remarkable. It was the opinion of dominant thinkers that the constitution represents a Polybian ideal refined by Machiavelli and transmitted by Harrington; that partisan combination was tolerable only when it was a virtuous part combined for the whole, that is, for the maintenance of the “matchless” constitution; that factious combination for power was a corruption of this matchless constitution and of the public virtue required to maintain it; and that if the constitution were out of balance, then what was required was a Machiavellian dictum, a return to the first principles of the mixed regime. In various writings, Hume would critique or dismantle each of these arguments, as well as criticize the Machiavellian teachings upon which many of these arguments rested.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet, as I will show, Hume levels a more foundational criticism of these views in “Of Parties in General,” using the Discourses to show that the Machiavelli whom many party thinkers had praised also provides a foundation upon which to diagnose these party divisions as the dangerous products of a uniquely modern problem.

Departing from the Orders of Others: Hume's Reordering of the Discourses Ranking

Thus far we have seen the intellectual context in which Hume writes his Essays and the way in which Machiavelli was often utilized in this context. I turn now to analyze “Of Parties in General” and to Hume's curious use of Machiavelli. As I will show, Hume's use of Machiavelli gives the essay a new frame, one that rests the correct analysis of party and constitutional politics on subverting the prevailing opinions of what is praiseworthy and blameworthy in modern political thinking. Hume models the first two paragraphs of “Of Parties in General” after the first paragraph of Discourses 1.10. Though ungainly, I quote both passages nearly in full to illustrate the reference. Consider first Machiavelli, from the chapter entitled “As Much as the Founders of a Republic and of a Kingdom Are Praiseworthy, So Much Those of a Tyranny Are Worthy of Reproach”:

Hume appropriates Machiavelli's hierarchy of praise and blame, with intentional revision. His “Of Parties in General” begins as follows:

Before turning to my argument that Hume is responding to Machiavelli, we must first consider the possibility that Hume intended to respond only to Bacon. In the first book of Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the scientist-philosopher praises the judgments of antiquity, when “founders and uniters of states” were “honoured with titles of worthies or demi-gods,” while “inventors and authors of new arts” were “consecrated amongst the gods themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Hume reverses the ordering and ranks founders above inventors. Importantly, Hume was also aware of Bacon's Essays, citing the work in both his own Essays (E 266) and in the History of England, Footnote ⁴⁶ and so was surely familiar with another of Bacon's rankings, found in “Of Honour and Reputation.” There Bacon does not mention inventors, and like Hume ranks “founders” as first in honor. As is widely noted, the “Of Honour and Reputation” ranking is a conscious revision to the Discourses 1.10 ranking, with Bacon audaciously omitting Moses in his list of founders deserving of praise.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bacon's engagement with Machiavelli is unsurprising, since he was outspoken in his admiration for “Machiavel and others,” who “write what men do and not what they ought to do,” and also spoke favorably about the esoteric or “enigmatical method,” which intends “by obscurity … to exclude the vulgar (that is the profane vulgar) from the secrets of knowledges.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps, by adopting the Machiavellian style and argument found in “Of Honour and Reputation,” Hume unintentionally ushered the Discourses ranking into his essay within the Trojan horse of the Baconian copy. It is therefore possible that Hume did not have Machiavelli in mind, and only intended to engage with Bacon.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, it is difficult to make sense of Hume's introductory critique of Bacon as a meaningful frame for an essay that will analyze threats to good founding, without also supposing that Hume is engaging with the original ranking found in the Discourses. Hume proclaims that Bacon is wrong in his ranking, because the benefits afforded by inventors cannot be utilized unless good laws and orders are first established (E 55). The importance of good orders is the foundational premise for the essay's analysis of parties. In the Treatise, when Hume first introduces his “science of man”—which includes the science of politics—he seems to ignore Bacon's political judgments by drawing an analogy between Thales and Bacon on the one hand, and Socrates and “some late philosophers in England” on the other (THN Intro.7, xvii Hume's emphasis). Bacon is thus cast as a model for experimental reasoning, but not as it applies to the political science of founding. Instead, a few essays before “Of Parties in General,” in “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science,” Hume singles out Machiavelli's realist orientation as praiseworthy for knowledge of good founding (E 23). In short, the praise due to Baconian inventors is conditional on good founding, and it is on this subject that Hume looks not to Bacon but to Machiavelli. We are not surprised to find, then, that after his ranking of praise, Hume singles out those deserving of blame, the founders of sects and factions. In so doing Hume ensures that his ranking resembles the Discourses more than Bacon, for in none of the Baconian rankings do we find parallel rankings of those deserving blame. Hume wishes to engage with both Bacon and Machiavelli. It is to the engagement with Machiavelli that I shall now turn.Footnote ⁵⁰

We can begin to shed light on why Hume introduces his essay in this manner by considering his conspicuous revisions to the ranks of the most praised and most blamed. In the Discourses ranking, “heads and orderers of religion” are considered the most praised, and “destroyers of religion” most detestable (DL 1.10.1). Hume promotes founders of laws by ranking first “legislators and founders of states” (E 54–55), but withholds praise for founders of religion. This is not because Hume has nothing to say about religion: he condemns those who have placed the refined precepts of philosophy and the severe injunctions of religion over wise laws and institutions. Then, in his ranking of the most blameworthy, he cites “founders of sects and factions” as those to “be detested and hated,” thus hinting that the ranking in the Discourses gets the most important judgment wrong: founders of religion, or at least founders of religious sects, are deserving of the highest blame.

That the demotion of religious founding is central to Hume's appropriation of the Discourses is further shown by his careful use of terms. He introduces the essay by excoriating “founders of sects and factions” as those most responsible for damaging the accomplishments of “founders of states” (E 55). The word “sect” is reserved for his analysis of parties of abstract speculative principle, which relate to “one sect of religion,” that is, the “Christian religion” (E 61). Hume is also careful with “founders”: of the four types of parties or factions discussed—personalistic, interest, principle, and affection—only parties of principle are given founders. No founders are mentioned for personalistic factions, for these factions of friendship and animosity arise from divisions already established. No founders are mentioned for factions of affection, as these factions are birthed from divergent affections towards possible or actual authorities, such as the Jacobite affection for the house of Stuart. Factions of interest, founded on the expectation of benefit from the established government, also lack founders. The only “founders” of factions or sects Hume analyzes in the essay are founders of sects, the priesthood, which was “allowed to engross all the authority in the new sect,” and promoted “keenness in dispute” to beget a “mutual hatred and antipathy among their deluded followers” (E 61–63). By naming priests as the founders of parties of speculative principle, Hume distinguishes them as the “founders of sects and factions” most condemned in the introduction to the essay. He introduces “Of Parties in General” by pointing to the preeminent importance of institutions, and then singles out Christian leaders near the end of the essay as the preeminent source of damage to these institutions. Thus, Hume thinks the Discourses ranking is wrong, and points the reader to the effects of Christianity as his reason for thinking so.

Hume's disagreement with the Discourses ranking, however, is likely not a disagreement with Machiavelli, only with the ranking Machiavelli reports in the Discourses. This can be seen by considering what Hume would have known about Machiavelli's stated opinions about religious founders and Christianity. Hume's ranking is given in his own voice and appears to be his own opinion. Yet we cannot say the same about the Discourses ranking, which Machiavelli does not explicitly endorse, nor give in his own voice. Tellingly, Machiavelli gives a contrary ranking later, this time in his own voice, when he praises Romulus and Tullus above Numa, condemning Numa's religious orders as dependent on fortune (DL 1.19.4). It seems the Discourses 1.10 ranking is the opinion of the many, and their judgment is suspect. This misjudgment is warned of in the Prince, where Machiavelli demonstrates that blame or praise is readily but often wrongly attributed to those who are “placed higher.”Footnote ⁵¹ It is likely, then, that Hume was aware that Machiavelli himself demotes religious founding.

Machiavelli's opinion on the Christian religion Hume has in mind, however, offers considerable interpretive difficulty, as Machiavelli's view of Christianity is a subject of substantial debate. Some forms of religion are for Machiavelli valuable tools for politics. Religion allowed Rome to “command armies, to animate the plebs, to keep men good, to bring shame to the wicked” (DL 1.11.2). The fear of God in Rome made “easier whatever enterprise the Senate or the great men of Rome might plan to make,” because the citizens “feared to break an oath much more than the laws” (DL 1.11.1).Footnote ⁵² The usefulness of religion extends to the problems of faction, as it was used to “Reorder the City” and “Stop Tumults” (DL 1.13.T). Machiavelli is far less sanguine about the usefulness of Christianity (see esp. DL 1.12, 2.2, 2.5, 3.1). He condemns Christianity for causing us to “esteem less the honor of the world,” and for producing citizens who “think more of enduring their beatings than of avenging them” (DL 2.2.2). Some scholars see Machiavelli's judgment as a call for a reformation, as he blames the weakness of the modern world on the “cowardice of men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not according to virtue” (DL 2.2.2). Viroli, for example, holds that Machiavelli advocates a religion of republican liberty, and argues that the “Christian religion properly interpreted is apt to serve such a civic task.”Footnote ⁵³ Sullivan, in contrast, rejects the possibility for reform: “Machiavelli finds that Christianity exerts a type of tyrannical rule over human beings, one that deprives them of their honor, dignity, and power.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Disagreements continue for the subject of faction: Mansfield interprets Machiavelli's analysis of factions that use “alien forces” in Discourses 1.7 as a critical reference to the “alien” forces of heaven,Footnote ⁵⁵ while others interpret this same passage without reference to Christianity at all.Footnote ⁵⁶

We can set aside the difficulty of interpreting Machiavelli's intention by limiting our consideration to Hume's stated interpretation of Machiavelli. His reading of Machiavelli's opinion of Christianity is that the religion leads to opinions that damage that which is most to be praised, good political founding. This can be found in the Natural History of Religion, where Hume cites Machiavelli's judgment that Christianity, at least under the Roman church, is a source of subjection and tyranny: “This gave rise to the observation of Machiavel, that the doctrines of the Christian religion (meaning the catholic; for he knew no other) which recommend only passive courage and suffering, had subdued the spirit of mankind, and had fitted them for slavery and subjection” (NHR 10.5; see DL 2.2.2). Like many of Hume's citations of Machiavelli, he feels this needs revision: “An observation, which would certainly be just, were there not many other circumstances in human society which controul the genius and character of a religion” (NHR 10.5). When Hume demotes founders of religion while referencing Machiavelli in “Of Parties in General,” the Florentine's contentions regarding Christianity would surely have been in Hume's mind, primarily Machiavelli's claim that modern politics is plagued by a religion that esteems those virtues that lead to subjection and blames the virtù that might lead to freedom. As we will see, Hume revises Machiavelli's understanding of Christianity's genius and character in of “Of Parties in General.”

Hume's appropriation of Machiavelli in the introduction to “Of Parties in General” thus provides a rich frame for understanding the analysis found in the rest of the essay. Hume introduces his analysis of parties by offering a ranking of what ought to be praised, and with this ranking he refers his reader to Machiavelli's famous ranking of what the many praise. The implied disjunction between what is and what ought to be praised is made explicit by the radical revision Hume makes to the Discourses ordering, not only refusing to praise religious founders, but pointing to their role in damaging the efforts of those founders most deserving of praise. Yet Hume does not mean religious founders generally, nor does he wish to engage with Machiavelli's opinions on pagan religions. Hume means the Christian religion, the same Christianity—albeit in its Roman form—that he knew Machiavelli thought had caused men to esteem or praise the wrong things, a misjudgment that had prevented good political founding. Hume frames his analysis of parties by pointing his reader to the idea that Christianity may blind us to the effectual truth of the thing in political life.

Praise and Blame in the Modern Religion

The Christianity of Machiavelli's experience created men more concerned with “enduring their beatings than of avenging them.” Thinking themselves in the possession of the “truth and the true way,” they sought after heaven at the expense of earth (DL 2.2.2). Yet in the postreformation world of religious wars and factious enthusiasm, Christianity ceased to be a force of idleness and weakness requiring the ferocity exemplified in ancient politics. The problem had been reversed: Christians no longer passively denied earth for heaven, they wished to forcibly bring heaven down to earth. Yet Machiavelli's original thesis remains foundational for Hume: the dominance of the Christian manner of thinking continues to harm the needs of good political founding. Machiavelli therefore plays an integral part of Hume's attempt to provide a scientific or neutral analysis of parties, for as we will see, in order to account for what has led to the parties of the British experience, Hume adopts and revises Machiavelli's original insights about what plagues modern thinking.

Following his appropriation of Machiavelli in the introduction to “Of Parties in General,” Hume establishes the need for an analysis of parties by pointing to the unfortunate truth that parties and factions grow quite naturally in all governments, and may cause the “total dissolution” of the government of which they are a part (E 55). The task of the founder and legislator, then, is to categorize their types, rank order their dangerous tendencies, and discern their causes. “Personal” factions are divisions of animosity, and though they are most frequent in small republics where factional animosities are easily incited and propagated, they plague all forms of division, as any real division is met with personal animosity. “Real” factions are those which contain in addition to personal animosity a real difference of interests or principles, or divergent affections toward competing royal lineages. Hume begins with the first, describing factions of interest as the “most reasonable, and the most excusable.” There are various “orders of men” in society, Hume continues, and whenever one of these orders gains some authority in government, it will seek to use government to satisfy its interest to the exclusion of others. We cannot expect “a different conduct, considering that degree of selfishness implanted in human nature” (E 59).

The foundation of this explanation is what Hume would explore and apply in “Of the Independency of Parliament,” where Hume prefaces his analysis of Walpolean corruption with a realist political maxim: “Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave” (E 42). The possible candidates for these “writers” are many,Footnote ⁵⁷ but Hume was surely aware of its original source in Machiavelli: “it is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have a free opportunity for it” (DL 1.3.1). Hume stipulates that this maxim is false in private life,Footnote ⁵⁸ but because men “will go greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned,” it remains “true in politics” (E 43). He then tells us how to take this maxim and apply it to the analysis of constitutional governments, where “power is distributed among several courts, and several orders of men,” by seeing if through the constitution the distinct interests are checked and directed to the public good (E 43). It was supposed by the Country party that the constitution had failed on these grounds when Walpole had created a faction in Parliament to vote for his interests. Hume places practice over theoretical principle and shows that the public good remained tolerably protected: had the venerated independence of Parliament been maintained, the overwhelming power of the commons would have destroyed the balance.Footnote ⁵⁹ Though inconceivable from Bolingbroke's theoretical perspective, factional corruption was in fact preserving the British mixed constitution (E 45).Footnote ⁶⁰

This realist analysis of the British constitution is the background for the claim Hume makes in the context of factions of interest in “Of Parties in General”: “It requires great skill in a legislator to prevent such [factions of interest]; and many philosophers are of opinion, that this secret, like the grand elixir, or perpetual motion, may amuse men in theory, but can never possibly be reduced to practice” (E 59). As Harris points out, the usual British reader would expect Hume to go on and disagree with these philosophers, and assert that the British constitution had in fact achieved this elusive arrangement.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Hume leaves the opinion of the “many philosophers” uncorrected, and continues to expand upon the claim that divisions of interest cannot be prevented in practice. Hume's purposes here are not so much to defend the “many philosophers” but to subvert the notion that the praiseworthiness of the constitution depends upon its holding to a providential or theoretical ideal over the data of experience. At the core of Hume's analysis of factions of interest is thus the application of the Machiavellian knave maxim, from which Hume rejects the prevailing opinions about what is praiseworthy and blameworthy in political institutions. Quite naturally then, Hume transitions to a critique of parties of principle, where he will diagnose one source of this misjudgment.

Parties of principle are “known only in modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phœnomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs” (E 60). The parties are easier to explain when the speculation is political in nature, for if we disagree about who should rule, our disagreement reflects two incompatible states of affairs; a monarchist and a republican cannot both be satisfied in practice. But if these speculative disagreements are theological or philosophical in nature, then the division is seemingly unaccountable, “for there is nothing outside the minds of those involved over which to divide.”Footnote ⁶² An Arminian and a Calvinist may disagree about the role of man's will in Christian salvation. Yet why would these theological speculations be joined to any violence of sentiment? Surely these speculations have little connection to the experiences of life that commonly energize our passions (THN 2.3.4.1, 419). Why such animosity when we can be perfectly secure in the “internal satisfaction” of our minds (THN 3.2.2.7, 488)? Does believing the other a heretic prevent both from peaceably using the same road? Engaging in commerce? Draining a meadow?

Hume begins to explain this “madness” by repeating in the essay the principles of human nature articulated a year or two before in the Treatise. Because the mind assumes that whatever it perceives perfectly reflects reality, it finds great pain when presented with the possibility of the alternative, and will seek to flee from or discredit the source of this pain (THN 1.4.2.37, 206). Though the mind certainly contains dissonant ideas, we have a natural propensity to ignore this, as we relate without reflection our own ideas into a seemingly coherent whole. This tendency makes us much more likely to perceive and be pained by the experience of interacting with those who disagree with our understanding of reality (THN 1.4.6.19, 261). Hume repeats this principle in “Of Parties in General”: “But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it … so [it] is shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, which most people discover in a dispute; and hence their impatience of opposition, even in the most speculative and indifferent opinions” (E 60–61).

Yet if the above tendency is a universal feature of the human mind, why are parties of religious and philosophical principle unique to the modern experience? Hume provides two explanations. The first contains shadows of Machiavelli (DL 2.5). Hume thinks Christianity's apolitical emergence led to the empowerment of an ambitious class of priests who find it in their interest to promote persecution. Prior to Christianity, whenever new religions would emerge, both rulers and ruled would be disposed to accept these new pieties. Rulers “embrace[d] the religion of the people,” and readily “united the ecclesiastical with the civil power” (E 61). The Christian religion, however, emerged in a different world, where “principles directly opposite to it were firmly established in the polite part of the world,” causing the civil authorities to reject the new “sect” (E 61). As a result, the priests of this burgeoning sect adopted the ecclesiastical authority the civil authorities rejected. The priests’ use of this authority, or rather misuse, informed the lasting character of Christianity as a persecuting religion. Interested in maintaining this ecclesiastical authority, the priests maintained an “imprudent zeal and bigotry,” instilled “violence” in their followers, and “engendered a spirit of persecution, which has ever since been the poison of human society, and the source of the most inveterate factions in every government” (E 61). The priests, then, should not be categorized with their followers: the followers of these factions comprise a faction of principle, but for the priests who are able to maintain their power by exciting these principles, they are factions of interest (E 62). In “Of the Parties of Great Britain,” Hume applies the same categories to the secular principled parties of the British constitution: the leaders of the parties are motivated by interest, and to ensure their own power, they will “go greater lengths than their principles would otherwise carry them” (E 65). This critical analysis follows from the knave maxim that politicians will be knaves—principles, no matter how honest and public-spirited in the hands of the citizen, become mixed with factious interest when placed in the hands of the ambitious.

Yet why have principles garnered such esteem in the modern mind in the first place, such that principles can be used by ambitious leaders for their own ends? And why do these esteemed principles, when placed in the center of public life, have such a tendency to promote zealous division? To account for this, Hume points to philosophy, not just theistic religion, as the underlying cause. In the ancient world, “sects of philosophy” were “more zealous than parties of religion,” yet in “modern times, parties of religion are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and ambition” (E 63). Factions of interest have calmed from their previous rage—as we learn elsewhere (E 407)—while religious parties have become enraged. There is something unique about Christendom to be accounted for. Those religions that emerged in ages “totally ignorant and barbarous” consisted of tales and fictions that either did not contradict the tales and fictions of other sects, or when they did, did not encourage hostile “reasoning and disputation” (E 62). Peaceful coexistence or even combination was possible. Christianity, however, emerged in a world already introduced to the systematizing speculation of philosophy. The leaders of this new sect, finding their personal interest tied to its survival, “were obliged to form a system of speculative opinions; to divide, with some accuracy, their articles of faith; and to explain, comment, confute, and defend with all the subtilty of argument and science” (E 62). These speculative systems assisted priests “in their policy, of begetting a mutual hatred and antipathy among their deluded followers” (E 63).

The modern religion of Christianity is thus an amalgam of theism and philosophy unknown in the ancient world, and it is through the dominance of this mixed religion in the modern mind that the divisiveness of philosophy has been ushered into politics and every other area of life.Footnote ⁶³ Hume portrays this mixture as a historical accident, but one that is predictable given the nature of theism. Unlike polytheistic religions, but like the ancient sects of philosophy (E 63), theism is predisposed to zealotry and intolerance by nature of its exclusivist claims (NHR 9.2). Moreover, theism readily attached itself to philosophic speculation because the “tenet [of theism] is so conformable to sound reason, that philosophy is apt to incorporate itself with such a system of theology” (NHR 11.3). Whatever its beginnings, then, Christianity became inseparable from philosophic speculation; “without philosophy, Christendom would not be what it is.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The incorporation of philosophy into theism first made philosophy serve the interests of superstition, energizing philosophy's zealotry and directing this intolerance towards any philosophical system contrary to the Christian one (EHU 11.3). In becoming the dominant religion, or more accurately, the dominant philosophical system, Christianity ushered these intolerant speculations into every area of life. All philosophic speculation is dangerous to politics, for the “political interests of society” have no “connexion with the philosophical disputes concerning metaphysics and religion” (EHU 11.27). The ancient philosophers were thus dangerous, as they claimed “total dominion” for their speculations, but their dangers rarely spilled outside of the philosophical sects.Footnote ⁶⁵ The “modern religion,” however, which replaced these ancient philosophies, “inspects our whole conduct, and prescribes an universal rule to our actions, to our words, to our very thoughts and inclinations; a rule so much the more austere, as it is guarded by infinite, though distant, rewards and punishments; and no infraction of it can ever be concealed or disguised” (EPM Dialogue.53).

As modern life became saturated with philosophical theism, the divisiveness inherent to this modern religion would inevitably plague political life as well. Hume thought this plague continued well into his own century, even after the seeming religious concord reached after the Glorious Revolution. Immediately following “Of Parties in General,” in “Of the Parties of Great Britain” and in “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” Hume demonstrates how prominent theological divides readily match onto and exacerbate contrary political impulses toward authority and liberty. He would repeat this sentiment in “Of the Coalition of Parties”: “the present fury of the people, though glossed over by pretensions to civil liberty, is in reality incited by the fanaticism of religion; a principle the most blind, headstrong, and ungovernable, by which human nature can possibly be actuated” (E 500).

In diagnosing modern religion, however, Hume seeks to provide an analysis not just of the religious wars which continue to echo in his century, but of what has led to, and what still characterizes, modern political division generally.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Hume, the religious fervor that still afflicts party politics was merely one symptom of the underlying disease that modern religion had given the modern mind. This disease is the dangerous political opinion “that philosophy should be a political authority or that the Platonic philosopher-king, taken literally, is the appropriate model for political society.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Underlying all party politics in the modern age, then, is a common opinion that philosophic speculation confers legitimacy on partisan organization. We thus find that “no party, in the present age, can well support itself, without a philosophical or speculative system of principles, annexed to its political or practical one.” As a result, “each of the factions, into which this nation is divided, has reared up a [philosophical or speculative system], in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions, which it pursues” (E 465). Indeed, as Merrill points out, the virulent opposition between parties of principle would not be possible without a deep agreement, born of Christianity's dominance, “that speculative philosophy should be the authority for political life.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus, while Bolingbroke and others looked back to 1688 as a bookend to religious and philosophical difference, and a move beyond fatal division, Hume saw a present and a future that had yet to deal with the underlying cause.

What has yet to be noticed about the diagnosis of the modern mind in “Of Parties in General” is that Hume presents this diagnosis as a conscious innovation upon Machiavelli. For Hume, the ground of political authority, and of political understanding generally, is opinion (EMPL 32). Authority everywhere depends on the maintenance of the opinion that some person or some idea has a legitimate relationship to political rule. The danger of the modern religion is that it gives men opinions about legitimacy that are dissonant with practice, leading to political divisions that cast blame on the realist orientation by which good political founding is made possible and legitimate in the eyes of the citizen. The problem with the modern religion is thus the problem Hume refers to in the essay's Machiavellian introductory ranking of praise and blame: the praiseworthy acts of the political founder are damaged by the founders of the Christian sect. The founders of religion praised in the Discourses ranking must be blamed in “Of Parties in General,” because the Christian founder's success hinders the political founder's success. The introduction to “Of Parties in General” is thus an announcement that Hume faces the same problem he saw Machiavelli face, the need to found altogether anew outside of the established orders of Christianity. So long as the people are drawn to divisions of speculative principle, the praiseworthy founding will remain elusive. Parties, like philosophers, must lower their aspirations, away from imagined republics and principalities back down to the “common course of the world” (THN Intro.10, xix). Hume's introductory praise of founders and legislators in “Of Parties in General” is then both descriptive and prescriptive: the praiseworthy founding will remain a difficult task until the praiseworthiness of proper founding is better understood.