Hume, David (1711–1776)

Andrew Sabl

David Hume was a British philosopher, historian, and essayist. He wrote no single treatise on political theory; his views on that subject appeared instead throughout his works on philosophy (A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals ); economics, morals, and other subjects (the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary ); and history (the multivolume History of England ). An older view of Hume that exaggerated his skepticism—real enough in Hume's writings on religion and, more ambiguously, epistemology, but absent from his political writings—has yielded in recent decades to a fuller picture that stresses Hume's original and lasting contributions to jurisprudence, theories of political legitimacy, the analysis of political party and faction, and what would come to be called coordination. This entry stresses those areas, although Hume's contributions to other fields—economics, the philosophy of religion, epistemology, esthetics, ethics, cultural anthropology, ...

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