I am very grateful for three serious responses to my lead essay on David Hume, which sought to make the case for understanding Hume first and foremost as a philosophical and anatomical thinker rather than an ideological or even a practical one. I can understand, however, that all the respondents seem to agree that my interpretation of Hume tilts to the liberal side, since I go on to argue that Hume’s philosophical investigations led him to a nomocratic, or law-centered, conception of politics, as opposed to a teleocratic one. But whether this is a liberal or conservative position is not a simple question.

　　In short, Hume’s analysis of limited government and the rule of law could be seen as encapsulating both “Smithian liberalism” based on the policy presumption of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way,” as well as the conservative disposition as described by Michael Oakeshott. And one could say that Hume has been able to inspire both liberal and conservative philosophies because he himself was neither in a straightforward sense (though we can identify both conservative and liberal positions in his political thought as well as his personal politics). As a side note, it has turned out to be as difficult to pin down his politics as either Whig or Tory (the political parties of his time). This is nicely captured by Aaron Zubia’s essay, “Hume’s Political Mechanisms.”

　　We must remember that Hume wrote before liberalism and conservatism became competing political ideologies in the nineteenth century. He died 250 years ago in the year of the Declaration of Independence, and his views on the American conflict are complicated to say the least and cannot be neatly summarized by his jibe that “I am an American in my principles.” His correspondence also contains contrasting opinions such as that “the Colonies … are still in their Nonage; and Dr Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon from their mother Country,” and “we [the British] should do full as well without any Connections with these factious Colonists.”

　　Of course, Hume also died before the French Revolution and the backlash against it, when conservatism is generally recognized to have emerged as a political philosophy and ideology. Interestingly, the counterrevolutionaries were absorbed by Hume’s writings, especially his History of England, with Joseph de Maistre dubbing Hume “the prophet of the counter-revolution.”

　　As I read the responses, I find myself agreeing with much in Tristan Rogers’s and Zubia’s apparently incompatible interpretations of Hume—one conservative and one liberal—probably because I do not think that they are necessarily incompatible positions. One reason why Hume remains a relevant political thinker is that this may also be true for us. For example, was the American Revolution liberal or conservative, or was it both? Is the American political order liberal or conservative? Isn’t the combination of liberal ideas of freedom, rights, and capitalism with conservative veneration for tradition, family, the founding, and, for many, religion, the key ingredient of American civilization? A modern word for a combination of this kind is fusionism.

　　Part of the challenge is that the word liberal underwent a great transformation in the United States in the twentieth century. As F. A. Hayek wrote in 1956: “I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term [i.e. liberal] but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.” Hayek would later write an essay titled “Why I am not a Conservative,” and tried to revive the word Whig as a modern label (though that is not very useful for us here since Hume was not a Whig).

　　In terms of minor quibbles, Zubia has unfortunately misread me when claiming that I have argued that Hume paved the way for the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole, which I was careful not to do. As it happens, I agree with Zubia that “[Hume] contributed to an Enlightenment that had already begun in Scotland.” My more modest claim was that Hume “pav[ed] the way for the sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment and the thought of his younger friends, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.” Hume’s influence on this mature stage of the Scottish Enlightenment, and on the thought of Smith and, with more qualifications, Ferguson—in Ferguson’s case, the critique of social contract theory and the methodology of “conjectural” and philosophical history—can hardly be overestimated. But I am, of course, fully aware that there are significant dimensions of the Scottish Enlightenment that are not Humean, notably the Aberdonian Enlightenment, but also several aspects of Ferguson’s writings, not to mention Francis Hutcheson’s. Hutcheson, an Irishman who taught at Glasgow, is generally known as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he was born 17 years before Hume.

　　The History of England is best read as an attempt to understand and explain political, social, and economic change.

　　I must admit that I don’t quite grasp what is to be gained from calling my interpretation of Hume “populist,” as Graham McAleer does in his “Hume’s Perplexing Priorities.” Let’s say that I am perplexed about that formulation. I do not think that populism is a useful category for understanding Hume’s political philosophy. As far as his personal politics were concerned, it is slightly more useful in that he was a strong opponent of what we may term populism. In the 1760s and 1770s, the extra-parliamentary opposition in Britain and popular protest in America were widely seen as intimately linked, and they were certainly connected in Hume’s mind. Hume detested the London radicals who corresponded and collaborated with the American rebels, as well as their champion in parliament, “that wicked Madman, [William] Pitt [the Elder],” as he called him. In the words of the historian J. G. A. Pocock, “Hume wanted to see the Americans independent not because he thought the London radicals right but because he thought them foolish and wicked, like their evil angel Pitt, and wanted to see them deprived of their rallying cry.”

　　Besides that, McAleer nicely unpacks some of the ironic twists in Hume’s history of civilization, and he makes an interesting case for Hume being more concerned with the delicacy of taste and character formation than my essay appears to have suggested. My lead essay was primarily focused on Hume’s agenda as set out in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), with its explicit ambition to apply the experimental method to moral subjects, including politics, as part of a science of human nature. I believe that the Oakeshottian lens is instructive in this regard, even if it is not perfect (and I take Zubia’s point that Hume is best understood on his own merits). Though Oakeshott was much less convinced about the fixity of human nature than was Hume, Oakeshott made a forceful case for philosophy as a mode of understanding rather than a tool for reformation. One could say that it is the opposite of Marx’s idea that the point of philosophy was to change, rather than interpret, the world.

　　Francis Hutcheson criticized Hume on exactly this score after having read the Treatise. The author of the Treatise appeared to lack warmth in the cause of virtue, Hutcheson wrote to Hume. Hume’s response in a letter to Hutcheson is instructive:

　　There are different ways of examining the Mind as well as the Body. One may consider it either as an Anatomist or as a Painter, either to discover its most secret Springs Principles or to describe the Grace Beauty of its Actions. I imagine it impossible to conjoin these two Views. Where you pull off the Skin, display all the minute Parts, there appears something trivial, even in the noblest Attitudes most vigorous Actions: Nor can you ever render the Object graceful or engaging but by cloathing [sic] the Parts again with Skin Flesh, presenting only their bare Outside. An Anatomist, however, can give very good Advice to a Painter or Statuary: And in like manner, I am perswaded [sic], that a Metaphysician may be very helpful to a Moralist; tho’ I cannot easily conceive these two Characters united in the same Work.

　　As I pointed out in my essay, after the Treatise, Hume developed a broader approach than the one he initially adopted, and this shift is emphasized by Rogers in “Hume’s Philosophical Conservatism.” Yet, I highlight that the anatomistic ambition did not disappear, and indeed it must be said to have been foundational for many of Hume’s later writings. This is particularly true of the early Essays; as Thomas Merrill has written in an important book, “Hume’s first essays were published less than two years after the appearance of the third volume of the Treatise, and … there is good reason to think that they restate the fundamental political project of the Treatise, albeit with more concrete detail and historical anchors.” I further maintain that the History of England is best read as an attempt to understand and explain political, social, and economic change, even though there are ancillary motives, both commercial and political.

　　Hume is too rich and complex a thinker to cover all parts of his thought in one short essay. What McAleer calls a “mischaracterization” is only a reflection of the fact that we have focused on different aspects and, crucially, different stages of Hume’s writings. The same applies to Rogers, who similarly suggests that I have forgotten about Hume the moralist and focused exclusively on the anatomist (even as I emphasized that “after theTreatiseHume was no longer exclusively an anatomist of human affairs”). In other words, I agree with Rogers that one could say that there are two versions of Hume the philosopher, but the crucial point is that they both begin with his science of human nature set out in the Treatise.

　　What all essays in this forum illustrate is that Hume’s entire oeuvre deserves the attention of modern readers from different perspectives. Whether we agree with him or not, we must recognize that Hume was a profound philosopher who asked some of the most difficult questions about human nature and society, an engaging and powerful essayist who undermined the ideologies of Whigs and Tories, and a penetrating and readable historian who explained the history of England and European civilization. His collected works rank among the finest writings in the Western tradition, and they warrant lifelong study.