Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Hume’s "History of England"

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied under Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey and Hans J. Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph. D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels strive to reflect, from his own experience, what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he (or she) thinks, and the way he feels about what he does.

In Buffa's new novel, Immunity, the President of the United States has ordered the murder of his political opponents—and the Constitution seems powerless to stop him.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers David Hume’s History of England. It begins:

In a brief preface to the six volumes of his History of England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar To The Revolution of 1688, David Hume remarked, “It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore I will be short.” And then he adds, “It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this narrative shall contain little more than the history of my writings; as, indeed all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations.”

Born in 1711, Hume was only twenty-seven when he published his Treatise of Human Nature, which, he reports, “fell deadborn from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots,” by which he means the religious zealots who despised any thought not found in the Bible. Hume’s Treatise did excite, some years later, one reader, Immanuel Kant, who “roused himself from his dogmatic slumbers” to write in reply the Critique of Pure Reason. Hume wrote three more books over the next fourteen years, books that would, each of them, become a permanent part of the small number of works still worth the time and effort of serious study. Then, in 1752, he “formed the plan of writing the History of England.” The first volume...[read on]

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Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand; The Golden Bowl; The Life of George Washington; Tacitus and the dangers of history; The Lost History of the American Constitution; Hume's History of England.

--Marshal Zeringue