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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.
- 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...
David Hume was born in 1711 to a moderately wealthy family from Berwickshire Scotland, near Edinburgh. His background was politically Whiggish and religiously Calvinistic. As a child he faithfully attended the local Church of Scotland, pastored by his uncle.
In Hume's own history of political thought, the main rivalry lay between moralistic politics and institutional politics, to one of which he devoted. He was not a founder of new political science who rejected traditional politics, but both a successor and an innovator of the tradition.
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.
This introductory chapter begins with discussions of Hume's political thought, his life, and works. It then argues that Hume's philosophy is logically relevant to his political thought without entirely determining its character.
