Published papers

E. C. Mossner claims that the portraits of Hume and Rousseau painted by Allan Ramsay were displayed in Hume’s parlour until his death, a view often repeated in secondary literature. However, Mossner offered no precise reference, and later scholars have reiterated his claim without attribution. This note traces Mossner’s claim to George Chalmers’s unpublished manuscripts, archived at Edinburgh University Library, which record the parlour’s decorations as related by David Callander, a nephew of Hume’s close friend Michael Ramsay. This note also explores other portraits mentioned by Callander and considers their later display in Baron Hume’s room.

This article presents a fully annotated, scholarly transcription of George Chalmers’s notes on David Hume, preserved in the Laing Collection at the University of Edinburgh Library. Written in an eighteenth-century hand that is in parts difficult to decipher, the manuscript has never been transcribed in its entirety; previous literature has drawn only on its most legible passages. By rendering the complete text available for the first time, and by identifying many of the individuals, publications, and events to which the notes allude, this article overcomes a long-standing barrier to relevant research. Chalmers (1742–1825) gathered anecdotes and personal testimony relating to Hume in the decades following his death, as part of a biography engaged closely with Scottish political economy. This article argues that these notes should be read not as miscellaneous biographical ephemera but as evidence of the process through which knowledge about Hume was collected, filtered, and transmitted to later biographical authority—most notably E. C. Mossner’s Life of David Hume, which uses several of Chalmers’s findings without citation. By situating Chalmers within the networks of Scottish political economy wherein he was a participant, the article illuminates how the historical record of Hume’s life was assembled after his death.

This paper aims to explain why David Hume supported the religious establishment despite his anti-clericalism. First, the Church of England could be regarded as a happy medium between two forms of false religion: superstition and enthusiasm. Second, Hume’s concern over “the tyranny of priests” led him to advocate a spiritual establishment bound to secular authority. Hume’s Erastianism does not contradict his opinion that civil magistrates should maintain impartiality in religious matters: both views reflect his thoroughly secular attitude towards religious institutions. Despite alleged differences between Hume and Adam Smith, they shared much common ground in their approach to religious institutions.

Despite the recent boom in research on the reception and influence of Hume’s writings, most scholars have overlooked the fact that his enigmatic essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” published in the Political Discourses in 1752, not only attracted the attention of some French intellectuals before and after the Revolution, but was also taken seriously by a significant number of radicals—such as Paine, Price, Godwin, Wollstonecraft—and other reform-minded Whigs—such as James Mackintosh. Although the influence ofHume’s plan on The Federalist, No 10, has been much discussed, what is more important is that these British reformers often associated his plan with the National Assembly after the Revolution in France. This essay demonstrates that Hume’s plan of a large republic with a bicameral system through a two-tier election was an important intellectual resource for his contemporaries and for later generations.

Recent research on David Hume has highlight- ed the significance of opinion in his political philosophy. In Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary and The History of England, Hume emphasizes the significance of established customs and opinion as guides for appropriate governance, supported by an underlying claim that enthusiasm cannot subsist for a long time. This study revisits these two views with a focus on Hume’s unfinished manuscript “Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour” and his descrip- tions of puritan enthusiasm as contagion and various con- spiracies in the History. The study demonstrates that Hume fully appreciated three points. First, some extraordinary customs have persisted longer than the dominant interpretation of Hume may suggest. Second, such customs cannot be justified by either their longevity or spontaneity. Third, it is difficult, if not impossible, for those living in extraor- dinary circumstances to evaluate them appropriately. Examining these three points primarily through the lens of political epistemology, Hume argues that both extraordinary and salutary institutions can arise from the operations and principles of the same human nature and persist for a long time.

In the biographies of David Hume, Horace Walpole’s name has been memorialised as the author of a forged letter assuming the identity of the King of Prussia. However, in the letter, Walpole’s scorn was directed against not only Rousseau, but also other French philosophes and, possibly, even Hume. Walpole drew a line between himself and the ‘pedants and pretended philosophers’, although he sometimes blurred the distinction between the two by considering an author or ‘man of letters’ synonymous with a ‘philosopher’. Walpole broached his lifelong stricture on modern pretentious philosophers to Hume in one of his letters, just after the Concise Account was published. Walpole’s thorough contempt for French philosophers appeared to Hume as a Rousseauian, anti-philosophical stance. In his reply, Hume attempted to advocate his thesis of intellectual improvement and moral cultivation. Meanwhile, in another letter written around the same time, Hume kept away from Turgot’s sanguine view of human progress. The distance that Walpole maintains between himself and the philosophers—through the Hume-Rousseau affair—casts a long shadow on his evaluations of Hume and his historical works, and leads to their differing assessments of the standpoint of philosophers in the age of lumières.

Despite mounting scholarship on the Rousseau–Smith connection, the possibility of overlap between the Humean and Rousseauian views of commercial society has not been explored. This is due to opposing views held by these two thinkers on this issue. However, Rousseau in the Confessions recorded a brief, but shrewd impressions on Hume’s Political Discourses, which he held before meeting Hume. In these comments, Rousseau, unlike his other French contemporaries, noted some republican aspects lurking in Hume’s political and economic essays. Moreover, after his two Discourses, Rousseau composed several other important works in which he revealed his more ‘mature’ economic arguments. Careful readings of these textual clues indicate that, in striking parallel with Hume, Rousseau conducts a thought experiment on the drastic change in the quantity of money and elaborates on the significance of industry and a certain type of luxury. Our purpose here is not to prove that Hume’s Political Discourses directly influenced Rousseau’s later writings, but to measure the extent to which Rousseau could share the Scot’s economic ideas by considering that the former may well have read the latter.

This article argues that Bernard Mandeville's ideas were more likely to have influenced Jeremy Bentham’s writings than previously believed. The conventional interpretation of Mandeville as a forerunner of the Hayekian "theory of spontaneous order" has obscured Mandeville and Bentham's shared emphasis on legal and interventionist solutions for the issues of prostitution and prisoners. This influence is evinced by focusing on some of Mandeville's minor works, which anticipated some of Bentham’s arguments. It is unlikely that Bentham directly knew of Mandeville's minor works, but his reformist and interventionist bent was consistent and discernible in the Fable, which Jeremy Bentham read in his youth.

It is generally assumed that in early modern Britain, chivalry—allegedly typified by the Crusades—was considered a negative or even ridiculous ideology until its rehabilitation by the pre-Romantic movement. However, this paper argues that Hume and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had already shown a deep interest in its historical role and influence on modern civilization. That Hume shared a broad interest in chivalry with contemporary philosophers does not undermine the novelty of his thought on this topic. In fact, the pioneering and unique aspects of his contributions can be clarified by setting them in context.

Hume's repeated mentions of the vicissitudes of civilization have thus far been neglected, overlooked, or misinterpreted by Hume scholars. Although his references to the “death” or “ruin” of a nation are somewhat hyperbolic, his cyclical view of history was neither mere rhetoric nor necessarily pessimistic. This paper aims to show that Hume's notion of historical fluctuations was deeply connected with his understanding of the universality of human nature. It also placed Hume in a strategic position from which he could criticize both those who believed in the possibility of perpetual progress and those who forecast the successive decline of the human world. To explore Hume's position in more detail, we must first examine the reasons his argument was often misunderstood, especially in the context of the “rich country–poor country” debate. We also need to examine how Hume's view of the cyclical nature of history, consistently held, can be reconciled with his status as one of the champions of modern civilization.

The significance of Hume's positive attitude towards luxury might have been overemphasized by his commentators. In fact, arguments in favor of "moderate" luxury had already been entertained before the emergence of Hume's position. Therefore to argue that Hume's argument entailed the defense of moderate luxury is not to identify in it anything particularly unique. Thus, the first aim of this paper is to clarify the nature of Hume's contribution to the ongoing luxury debates. This does not consist merely of an assertion of the compatibility of moral virtue with the enjoyment of luxury, but lies rather in Hume's emphasis on two aspects of the beneficial interaction between morality and luxury. First, the historical process of the introduction of luxury is regarded by Hume as fostering new morals peculiar to the commercial age; and secondly, the enjoyment of luxury is seen as a condition favorable to the maintenance of morals. The second aim of this paper is to shed some new light on an aspect of Hume's thought that, so far, has been relatively neglected, namely, his distinction between "innocent" and "vicious" forms of luxury, as well as his acknowledgement of the possibility of the emergence of the latter, as well as the former, in the modern commercial world. However, this does not necessarily lead us to a more pessimistic interpretation of Hume's view of luxury than those accepted thus far; only to the awareness of how difficult and delicate, in Hume's view, is the maintenance of the balance between the interlinked concepts of industry, knowledge, and humanity.