Hume: Political Essays

by David Hume, Knud Haakonssen (Editor)

David Hume is commonly known as one of the greatest philosophers to write in English. He was also one of the foremost political and economic theorists and one of the finest historians of the eighteenth century. His political essays reflect the entire range of his intellectual engagement with politics - as political philosophy, political observation and political history - and function as an extension of and supplement to works such as his Treatise of Human Nature and his History of England. The twenty-seven most important essays are presented in this fully annotated edition, together with excerpts from the History of England which illuminate their context. This major addition to the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, philosophy and the history of ideas.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Economics, Classics, Political Science, Essays

416 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1752

About the author

David Hume was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism.

In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day.

His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist.

Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem.

Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell, and Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy). Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers".

Reviews

[Samuel Hoover]

Good notes, like the appendix with bits of Hist of England in it too.

[Antoine]

Un livre qui a mal vieilli. Certaines idées comme celles sur le luxe et l’égalité sont encore intéressantes, mais la plupart semble propre à son époque. Ceux qui touchent la monnaie, l’intérêt, la dette publique et les impôts sont particulièrement mis hors jeu par les études plus récentes comme la MMT. Sa défense de l’aristocratie est aussi difficile à apprécier près de 300 ans plus tard. Il demeure tout de même intéressant de voir comment la pensée de Hume se plaçait dans sa génération des lumières.

[Alice]

Not as Humey as the Treatise imho

[Erik Graff]

The political essays of Hume, like those of Locke, give some idea of the mental horizon of the constitutional theorists who shaped the American government.