Category: David Hume

Knud Haakonssen’s first rate study of Adam Smith’s larger moral project starts not with Smith, but with his friend and fellow Scotsman, David Hume.¹ Of particular interest here are Hume’s idea of justice as the product of ‘unintended consequences’, its consequences for the universal nature of justice, and criticisms of the social contract theories popular in England and France at the time, courtesy Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others. Hume’s treatise is written for the man on the street, for the common-sense person, deigning most of the views of the philosophes — and of the ancients, too. Despite its scepticism, it is not nihilist; the implications are perhaps even more vindictive of certain general questions of order and hierarchy than one may expect from the likes of a sceptic. Haakonssen describes Hume’s project as a voyage to “explain how a common world is created out of private and subjective elements.”² While Hume’s conclusions, particularly those in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, leave ample to be desired and much to be feared, on some other counts his search is more agreeable. The questions he poses are far-sighted and probing, and for all purposes his scepticism produces a world where passion guides reason. He famously declares: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (2.3.3.4).³ Beneath this veneer of provocation and supposed iconoclasm is a more measured stance, one that is essential to the enterprise that is upon us, namely a more nuanced articulation of the views of his most famous ‘successor’, Adam Smith.

Continue reading “A Sceptical Order: David Hume’s A Treatise Of Human Nature” →