Hume Political Writings

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.

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

David Hume (1711-1776) is perhaps best known for his treatises on problems of epistemology, skepticism, and causation. A less familiar side of his intellectual output is his work on legal and political theory. 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. Through close textual analysis, Neil McArthur suggests that the key to Hume's political theory lies in its distinction between barbarous and civilized government. Throughout the study, the author explores Hume's argument that a society's progress from barbarism to civilization depends on the legal and political system by which it is governed. Ultimately, McArthur demonstrates that the skepticism apparent in much of Hume's work does not necessarily tie him to a strict conservative ideology; rather, Hume's political theory is seen to emphasize many liberal virtues as well. Based on a new conception of Hume's political philosophy, this is a groundbreaking work and a welcome addition to the existing literature.

Hume's Politics provides a comprehensive examination of David Hume's political theory, and is the first book to focus on Hume's monumental History of England as the key to his distinctly political ideas. Andrew Sabl argues that conventions of authority are the main building blocks of Humean politics, and explores how the History addresses political change and disequilibrium through a dynamic treatment of coordination problems. Dynamic coordination, as employed in Hume's work, explains how conventions of political authority arise, change, adapt to new social and economic conditions, improve or decay, and die. Sabl shows how Humean constitutional conservatism need not hinder--and may in fact facilitate--change and improvement in economic, social, and cultural life. He also identifies how Humean liberalism can offer a systematic alternative to neo-Kantian approaches to politics and liberal theory. At once scholarly and accessibly written, Hume's Politics builds bridges between political theory and political science. It treats issues of concern to both fields, including the prehistory of political coordination, the obstacles that must be overcome in order for citizens to see themselves as sharing common political interests, the close and counterintuitive relationship between governmental authority and civic allegiance, the strategic ethics of political crisis and constitutional change, and the ways in which the biases and injustices endemic to executive power can be corrected by legislative contestation and debate.

As part of the tried and true model of informal essay writing, Hume began publishing his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary in 1741. The majority of these finely honed treatises fall into three distinct areas: political theory, economic theory and aesthetic theory. Interestingly, Hume's was motivated to produce a collection of informal essays given the poor public reception of his more formally written Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. He hoped that his work would be interesting not only to the educated man, but to the common man as well. He passionately argues that essays provide a forum for discussing his philosophy of "common life." DAVID HUME (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian. Educated at Edinburgh, he lived in France from 1734 to 1737, where he finished his first philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). His additional philosophical works include An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Political Discourses (1752), The Natural History of Religion (1755), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).