Abstract

To balance a large state or society, whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it.Andrew Sabl’s Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England is an impressive tribute to the Tacitus of the eighteenth century. His study offers a reading of the History of England “as if it were a treatise on this one subject: how conventions of political authority arise, change, improve by various measures, and die”.1 Hume’s History, according to Sabl, is much more than a mere narrative of the gradual emergence of a stable constitutional monarchy on the English...