David Hume thought philosophically about politics. If he had not, John Witherspoon, the Princeton educator who taught a future president, a future vice president, as well as future judges, senators, and representatives, would not have recommended his writings to his students. Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher, would not have developed an entire system of thought—taught in Scotland and the United States for the next century—as a direct response to Hume. Theologians, such as Jonathan Edwards, and college presidents, such as Timothy Dwight, Edwards’ grandson, would not have wrestled with and publicly commented on Hume’s philosophy. Had Hume not thought philosophically about politics, we would not be reading about him today.

　　For Hume, thinking philosophically about politics meant freeing himself from subservience to party doctrine. He refused to look at politics solely through a Whig or Tory lens. He also claimed to have no master in the practice of philosophy. In so doing, he differentiated himself from members of ancient philosophical sects who were bound by their schools’ respective doctrines. In these ways, Hume sought to maintain his independence of mind.

　　As Max Skjönsberg eloquently argued, there are similarities between Hume and Oakeshott. For Oakeshott, thinking philosophically about politics meant not looking at politics through the lenses of democracy or Marxism. Adherents of these ideologies interpret reality—and try to reshape reality—according to their abstract theoretical commitments. Oakeshott, like Hume, tried to maintain his independence of mind. So should we.

　　But when we analyze Hume’s thought, we should not look at his writings through an Oakeshottian lens. Instead, we should interpret Hume on his own merits, maintaining our own independence of mind as we assess Hume’s influence on the 250th anniversary of his death. And what we will find is a skeptical political philosopher whose writings helped shape liberal views of governance, but whose writings lack the tools to extract us from the liberal crisis that plagues us today.

　　Hume, the Essayist and Historian

　　In the twenty-first century, we are inclined to think of Hume as the philosophical political analyst. But in eighteenth-century Britain, the Whigs and the Tories would have thought of themselves—not Hume—as approaching politics philosophically. After all, they held coherent theories pertaining to the ancient constitution, authority, liberty, and the origin of government. And they faithfully applied those doctrines to political life. Hume controverted this view. And he did so by approaching politics historically. It was in this sense that Hume most influenced the founders of our country.

　　Hume regularly situated himself against those “infatuated with party-systems.” He suggested that the “sublime” theories guiding Whig and Tory politicians led to “preposterous” conclusions at odds with the facts on the ground. He argued against the excessive Tory deference to authority, which he thought was impracticable and derived in part from the dissipated belief in the divine right of kings. He argued against the excessive Whig resistance to authority, based on the idea of an original contract, a “chimerical” doctrine productive of “absurdities” in the real world, among them, turning the principle of disobedience into the first principle of government.

　　This is indicative of Hume’s broader method when inquiring into matters of fact and experience, which entailed finding the extreme type of a given perspective and arguing against it. In his immensely popular essays, Hume situated himself against all kinds of extremes. He found fault with those who were too optimistic about human nature as well as those who were too pessimistic. He sought a middle ground. He discountenanced the human tendency to be too superstitious, too enthusiastic, too dogmatic, and too skeptical. Again, he sought a middle ground.

　　In his widely read, six-volume History of England (1754–62), Hume showed how extremes in political history had produced discord and civil war. He described in his masterfully crafted narrative—Hume was a skilled literary stylist—how the Whig tendency toward liberty, in its extreme historical manifestations, led to anarchy and how the Tory tendency toward authority, in its extreme historical manifestations, led to tyranny. He then outlined how the Glorious Revolution, where his History of England concludes, had delicately balanced these forces, thereby forming what he considered the most nearly perfect governmental arrangement ever established, consisting of “an hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives,” or, in other words, a mix of “the bestMonarchy,Aristocracy, andDemocracy.”

　　Hume’s Lessons for America’s Founding Generation

　　Hume’s search for a judicious balance between competing forces, most notably authority and liberty, is on full display in both his History and his Essays. His approach to the study of political institutions was by turns skeptical, scientific, moderate, historical, and empirical. And central figures in the American founding period gleaned valuable lessons from his political writings.

　　James Madison, for example, drew from Hume’s scheme for an imagined perfect commonwealth when arguing for the possibility of an extended republic. Madison also learned from Hume’s psychological understanding of constitutional attachment, as evidenced in Federalist #49. Madison’s treatment of faction in Federalist #10 drew directly from Hume’s Essays. And Alexander Hamilton’s comments on constitutional development in Federalist #85 reveal familiarity with Hume’s understanding of how balanced governments form through trial and error over time.

　　He tried to check his hubris at the same time he sought to topple the classical Christian conception of the human person.

　　Nevertheless, Hume’s political insights, gathered from robust inquiry into historical experience, were not all original. Many insights pertaining to mixed government, checks and balances, and constitutional attachment, for example, were shared by other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. What the American founders tended to appreciate from Hume were insights belonging to the wisdom of past generations (with the exception of the possibility of an extended republic, which really was an innovation). Political theorists had long warned about the dangers of pure political forms and recommended the proper institutional balance of classes and interests as the path to peace, stability, and longevity. Hume was most influential in America, then, when he was least original and most conservative, writing about time-tested political truths drawn from political experience.

　　Hume, the Philosopher

　　Hume was an innovator less in politics than in his philosophical writings, which are still required reading in many university curricula. It was in philosophical matters that Hume was most controversial.

　　Skjönsberg writes that Hume “pave[d] the way” to the Scottish Enlightenment. But that is not quite right. It is more accurate to say that he contributed to an Enlightenment that had already begun in Scotland. Beginning with figures such as George Turnbull and Francis Hutcheson, and continuing with the likes of Hume, Reid, and Adam Smith, Scottish philosophers sought to articulate a science of man, capturing permanent, universal features of human nature that are foundational to all subsequent inquiry. Hume admitted that by applying the experimental method to morals, he was contributing to an ongoing project engaged in by previous philosophers, including John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Joseph Butler, and Hutcheson.

　　Hume hoped that by applying this method he might arrive at more certain and useful conclusions, based on experience, which he considered the only valid authority in philosophical matters. Having deployed his skeptical empirical method in the first two books of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he arrived at a science of man that he admitted was radical. The first reviewer of his Treatise commented that Hume had tried to enact a revolution in human thought.

　　Hume’s early reviewers were shocked by his conclusions that it is impossible to rationally defend our belief in the existence of the self, the independent existence of the external world, and the uniformity of nature. Hume vividly described his journey to these conclusions. And this journey continues to enthrall readers today. Amid this journey, which—Hume wrote—left him philosophically shipwrecked, he turned upside down the classical Christian philosophic vision of the human person as a rational animal. He carried on his philosophical investigations on a new foundation, a new science of man, according to which the passions rule reason and feelings, not reason, determine our moral standards.

　　Hume’s portrayal of man as the passionate animal is one of his lasting innovations. Hume did have conservative instincts, though. He tried to check his hubris at the same time he sought to topple the classical Christian conception of the human person and revolutionize how we think about man. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), which he considered his best book, he asked whether he truly could have discovered something new in moral philosophy, namely, that virtue and vice are established by feeling, rather than reason.

　　The mean between the extremes may direct you to virtue, but does not always, or even reliably, point you to truth. And the truth is what philosophy is all about.

　　Hume wrote: “It might be expected that this principle would have occurred even to the first rude, unpractised enquirers concerning morals.” Realizing that, if he were one of the few people to venture such a theory in the long history of reflection on practical morals, he might be wrong, he admitted to falling “back into diffidence and scepticism.” He suspected that, if his theory were true, it would have been subject to universal consent long before the eighteenth century.

　　Despite this superficial show of humility, he never withheld, recanted, or suppressed his radical philosophy, though he did stop short of publishing his most controversial essays, released posthumously, which sanctioned suicide, criticized belief in the immortality of the soul, and argued against the existence of a morally perfect, personal, providential Creator God.

　　Hume’s Method of Moderation

　　In philosophy and politics alike, Hume skeptically assaulted what came before, whether Whig or Tory political theory or scholastic metaphysics, the books of which he said should be tossed into “the flames.” He stated radical conclusions, for example, that the self is nothing more than a bundle of perceptions in perpetual flux, or that it is not contrary to reason “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” He then stepped back and with yet more skepticism and diffidence, sought the middle way in all things.

　　One of the major attractions of Hume’s posture towards politics is his resistance to faction and fanaticism. He submitted to no party. He despised dogmatism. For those of us witnessing the degeneration of political discourse in person and online, there is a temptation to skeptically refute one side, then the other, and then try to find the truth somewhere in between. In many ways this is a healthy approach, a healthy skepticism, for which Hume provides a model. Healthy skepticism is a helpful trait to possess.

　　At the same time, thinking philosophically about politics is first and foremost about discovering the truth about politics. Finding the middle ground does not always get you to the truth. As Aristotle taught, reliably choosing the mean between the extremes in regard to emotion and action is the path of virtue. Courage, for example, is the right response to the emotion of fear, the middle way between cowardice and foolhardiness. But the middle way does not necessarily lead you to truth. For example, if there are two witnesses to a crime, and one says the perpetrator had a moustache, while another says the perpetrator had a beard, it is not necessarily true that the perpetrator had a goatee.

　　The mean between the extremes may direct you to virtue, but does not always, or even reliably, point you to truth. And the truth is what philosophy is all about. It is what the Scottish Enlightenment was all about. Hume, like his fellow Scottish philosophers, knew the truth about human nature was the foundation of all the sciences.

　　As Hume argued in the Treatise, mathematics, natural philosophy, natural religion, logic, morals, criticism, and politics are all founded on our knowledge of human nature. “There is no question of importance,” Hume wrote, “whose decision is not comprizd in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science.” Hume endeavored to propose “a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new.”

　　For Hume’s contemporaries, including Hutcheson and Witherspoon, the human person, composed of body and soul, exercises reason in God’s image and likeness. The end of political life, moreover, is wisdom. The attempt to form political institutions to balance powers, thereby reducing the threat of tyranny, is necessary, but secondary to the first aim, a failsafe in case virtuous statesmen are not at the helm.

　　A Humean polity, though, does not aim at wisdom. And this follows from his science of man. Hume, though a moderate skeptic in many laudable ways, was excessively skeptical of the human possibility for rationally conceiving of the nature of reality, the existence and nature of God, and the nature and existence of the soul. He contended that the human beings who inhabit the political order are driven merely by passions and incentives. As a result, Hume praised a modern political order which substituted industry and commerce for religious faith, political activity, and philosophical instruction as the sources of moral training and social unity.

　　Hume’s political vision is one that downgrades reason, denigrates the role of the lawgiver, and derides the potential of rational deliberation to steer the political community towards any substantive concept of the good. For Hume, balancing power was the first order of business in politics, the highest outcome for which we can hope. The achievement of this balance, as the narrative of Hume’s History indicates, requires that society overcome the superstitious, factious, and fanatical legacy of a benighted past that placed its hope in creeds and doctrines, in moral and religious instruction, that is, in man’s rational and spiritual nature, which Hume spurned.

　　Hume’s liberal vision finds echoes in John Rawls’s political liberalism, which dominated the latter half of the twentieth century. Rawls portrayed liberalism as an answer to the problem of reasonable pluralism, in which competing creedal, expansionist, salvationist creeds cause perpetual conflict with no chance for compromise. In this way, among others, Rawls worked within a Humean frame. Hume, then, played a pivotal role in the liberal history of lowering our sights, of portraying temporal advancement as the only possible terms by which to arrange our public lives.

　　Our fraying and decaying political orders prove that we are not mere bundles of perceptions in perpetual flux, that we cannot live by bread alone, and that our unity cannot consist solely in terms of dollars and cents. The woke, identitarian left destructively cries out for meaning in public life. The new right responds by rejecting the spurious idea of a neutral public sphere and seeks to recover a robust sense of the common good as the glue that binds political communities together. A Humean today might be inclined to find the middle ground between the woke left and the new right. But that would not necessarily be the truth-seeking, philosophical approach to politics.

　　Political liberalism, as it has developed since Hume’s time, has been excessively reliant on procedure and excessively confident in the prospects for peace without robust public discourse about substantive goods. Thinking philosophically about politics should lead us to react against these excesses. Perhaps, if he were alive today, even Hume would agree.