Abstract

At a pivotal moment in the Treatise of Human Nature David Hume proposes a political coalition of philosophers and what he calls "'honest gentlemen" over and against the superstitious. This dissertation examines the question of how to understand the philosophic significance and practical consequences of this coalition. It proceeds by means of a close examination of key passages in several of Hume's works, including the Treatise of Human Nature, the two Enquiries, the Essays and the History of England, among others. It concludes that this political coalition is the basis for a reformulation of the basis for human society, and that this reformulation is best understood as the replacement of civil religion as the bond of society by civil society as an order of free and respectable individuals. Moreover, this political intent is closely connected with Hume's discovery of a realm of collective and unintended self-legislation that makes a common world possible through the conventions of language and justice. Most traditional readings of Hume see him as an emotivist, an empiricist, and a political quietist. In contrast, I argue that the various conventions Hume's chastened philosophers discover function as a sort of parallel to Kant's synthetic a priori. On a political level, this reading allows us to make sense of Hume's reinterpretation of the social contract tradition: while there is no original contract, a hypothetical contract must be understood as implied in social life as such. From this flow the crucial elements of Hume's liberalism: a qualified right of rebellion, the moral rationale of modern commercial republicanism, and the central role of public opinion. The Hume I present is thus not a mere skeptical spur to later thought but one of the founders of a school of thought that seek nature in convention and reason in history