Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

This chapter builds on the framework and context established in Chapter 1, which in many ways shaped the political experience of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). It provides a revisionist interpretation by demonstrating that, rather than an anti-party writer, Bolingbroke is best understood as the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition in resistance to what he perceived to be a Court Whig faction in power. Drawing on all of Bolingbroke’s well-known works, as well as his lesser-known journalism and unpublished sources, the chapter shows how most of his writings were calculated to legitimise opposition in the shape of a specific kind of political party: the Country party.

Among Hume’s most important discussions of party can be found in his History of England, especially in the volumes on the seventeenth century. Hume explained to Adam Smith that he had begun his historical investigation with the Stuart period partly because the factions, which he believed still informed British politics in the eighteenth century, arose at that time. His own historical work, however, was a conscious attempt to rise above faction and to see things both ways, which he believed English historiography had failed to do before him. This chapter places Hume’s History in the context of Rapin and Bolingbroke, but also in the broader context of debate around ancient constitutionalism and Whig history. This chapter points to the important influence of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which had a notable impact on Hume between his essays and the publication of the History.

The most significant figure in the opposition to Walpole, besides Bolingbroke, was the Whig William Pulteney. However, Pulteney’s involvement with Bolingbroke’s Country party platform, whose raison d’être was to unite Tories and Whigs, ended upon the fall of Walpole in 1742. After Walpole’s resignation, Pulteney abandoned the Tories when he resisted attempts to prosecute Walpole and accepted a seat in the Lords as the Earl of Bath. John Perceval wrote a notorious pamphlet defending Pulteney/Bath, entitled Faction Detected by the Evidence of Fact (1743). In Faction Detected, Perceval distinguished between legitimate and factious opposition, associating the former with Whigs and the latter with Tories and Jacobites. This chapter also discusses various reversionary oppositions and the transitory broad-bottom administration in the mid-1740s.