Commerce And Politics In Hume S History Of England

Illuminates the relationship between Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist and highlights the social, economic and institutional changes which he wove into an innovative theory of causation

This volume on Hume's politics brings together essays that have been formative of the scholarly and more general debate about Hume's political thought. Unlike many theorists who express their thought in terms of system, Hume uses the incidental genre of the essay as the vehicle for his writing and his mode of presentation is a reflection, indeed an expression, of his belief in the limited power of reason to give any over-all shape to human life. Hume's politics are particularly suited for discussion of a wide range of view-points. The possibilities of seeing in Hume both the conservative and the liberal are pursued along with Hume's sophisticated analysis of party-politics. His acute and pioneering theorisation of perhaps the most central issue for 18th-century political observers, that of commerce and politics, is brought out in the context of his ideas of the international order. His fundamental theory of justice is discussed in its connection with law, property and government.

LIBERTY IN HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND In his own lifetime, Hume was feted by his admirers as a great historian, and even his enemies conceded that he was a controversial historian with whom one had to reckon. On the other hand, Hume failed to achieve positive recognition for his philosophical views. It was Hume's History of England that played an influential role in public policy debate during the eighteenth century in both Great Britain and in the United States. Hume's Hist01Y of England passed through seven editions and was beginning to be perceived as a classic before Hume's death. Voltaire, as an historian, considered it "perhaps the best ever written in any lan guage. " Gibbon greatly admired Hume's work and said, of a letter written by Hume in 1776 praising the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that a compliment from Hume "overpaid the labor of ten years. " After Hume's death on August 20, 1776, the History became a factor in the revolutionary events that began to unfold. Louis XVI was a close student of Hume's History, and his valet records that, upon having learned that the Convention had voted the death penalty, the King asked for the volume in Hume's History covering the trial and execution of Charles I to read in the days that remained. But if Louis XVI found the consolations of philosophical history in the Stuart volumes, Thomas Jefferson saw in them a cause for alarm.

David Hume's Political Theory brings together Hume's diverse writings on law and government, collected and examined with a view to revealing the philosopher's coherent and persuasive theory of politics.

This collection of twelve new essays by distinguished scholars in the fields of history and the philosophy of economics is one of the first book-length studies of Hume‘s political economy.

The first thematically arranged collection of Hume's political writings, this new work brings together substantive selections from A Treatise on Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, with an interpretive introduction placing Hume in the context of contemporary debates between liberalism and its critics and between contextual and universal approaches.

In this compelling and accessible account of the life and thought of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), Professor Christopher J. Berry of the University of Glasgow argues that the belief in the uniformity of human nature was at the heart of Hume's thought. In this volume, Berry introduces classic 'Humean' themes including the evolution of social institutions as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of self-interest, the importance of custom and habit in establishing rules of just conduct, and the defence of commerce and luxury. The book reveals Hume as an original thinker, whose thought may be understood as a combination of various strands of conservatism, libertarianism and liberalism.

A fully annotated edition of Hume's most important political essays.