Neo-classical history and English culture

by Philip Stephen Hicks

This book shows how our idea of history was shaped by historians and their readers in eighteenth-century England. Philip Hicks reinterprets the historical writing of the early-modern era as a vibrant clash between ancient models for historical composition and a modernizing culture characterized by party politics, print, Christianity and antiquarian erudition, and traces the social, literary and political implications of neoclassical history for English culture at large. By paying unprecedented attention to historical genres and audiences, this study overturns the orthodox view of David Hume as simply a 'philosophical historian' and portrays him instead as a celebrated peer of Livy and Tacitus. By resuscitating neoclassical historiography, both Hume and the 1st Earl of Clarendon breathed life into their disparate political programs; by failing to come to grips with neoclassical ideals, Jonathan Swift and Lord Bolingbroke languished in the coveted role of Thucydidean historian of one's o