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- Hume developed his political thought most explicitly in political essays of the 1740s and 1750s, and in his multivolume History of England (1754–1762).
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Hume sees all governments as the result of a struggle between authority and liberty, with the best of them achieving a balance between the two by implementing systems of “general laws.” Hume’s cautious approach to social change may fairly be called conservative.
May 28, 2006 · David Hume believed that most of the views about society and politics prevalent in his day had roots in one or another of “two species of false religion” superstition and enthusiasm. Both were developments of conflicting theological doctrines that appealed to two different types of personalities.
- Knud Haakonssen
- 1993
- Human Nature and Causation
- Morality
- Politics
Hume begins from our “perceptions,” the basic elements of human experience. These divide into “Impressions,” which “comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul”; and “Ideas,” which are “the faint images of these [impressions] in thinking and reasoning.” Ideas are built up out of impressions,...
Much moral philosophy aims at explaining what behavior is moral, and why we ought to be moral. Hume, by contrast, assumes from the outset that human beings have a functional capacity to make moral judgments and use moral ideas such as virtue, vice, duty, obligation, and blame in a way that makes sense. Moreover, he observes, we are motivated to act...
Hume discussed both current and fundamental political and economic matters in various essays he wrote from the 1740s onward. Notable among these are essays on liberty, political parties, the question of whether politics can be reduced to a science, and on money, credit, and taxes. The economic essays argue against mercantilism, and the political es...
Feb 26, 2001 · Hume's “Advertisement” for the first two books of the Treatise promised subsequent works on morals, politics and criticism, but his Political Discourses, “Of Tragedy,” and “Of the Standard of Taste” are our only hints as to what he might have said about those topics.
Oct 25, 2017 · Introduces the relevant elements of Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics and theory of the passions, followed by extensive discussions of Hume’s critique of moral rationalism, his account of the virtues, and his theory of moral judgment.
Aug 1, 2007 · We can divide the political theory into, first, Hume's general explanation of the state (chapter 5) and, second, his account of how it works once in place in his analysis, for example, of law and justice (chapter 6). In both cases, the primary background understanding is the force of convention in maintaining order.
