In ‘Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’, Karen Green takes exception to my account of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker. She argues that Hume is not an Enlightenment thinker, because he does not argue for the rights that underpin modern democracy; that this failure is inevitable, given his basic principles, because empiricism is an inadequate foundation for Enlightenment principles; and that it is Catharine Macaulay, and not Hume, who should be classed as the genuine historian of the Enlightenment. I will consider each of these three theses, and offer a concluding moral.

The Enlightenment, Democratic Rights – and ‘Whig History’

The Enlightenment, says Green, ‘consisted fundamentally in the establishment of the development of the idea that individuals have political rights, which underpins the growth, during the nineteenth century, of democratic forms of government’. On this basis, she concludes, ‘Hume is not a philosopher of the Enlightenment’. There is no doubt that the inference is sound. If that is what the Enlightenment was, then Hume did not belong to it. But is this tight focus on political rights the most convincing approach to understanding the Enlightenment? It should already be clear, from ‘Hume and the Enlightenment’, that I think it is not: it ignores the more moderate strands of Enlightenment thought, giving priority to the radicalism of the late Enlightenment in France.