Abstract

This chapter looks closely at the reception of Hume's ideas in the 18th-century ‘coterie de Milan’: Alessandro and Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria. Alessandro, a traveller to Paris and London in 1766–8, sees his own dispute with Beccaria reflected in Hume's dispute with Rousseau, and champions Hume's ‘meek’ (religious) thought against the radical views of the French ‘philosophes’ supported by his brother. Alessandro's interpretation of Hume's philosophical stance and of the Natural history of religion are used here to cast a new light on Hume's alleged denial of ever having met an atheist and on his refusal to write an Ecclesiastical History. The way Alessandro was ‘cutting off the noble parts’ of Hume's work in order to make it religiously mild reminds us of some present-day appropriations and mis-readings.