The political science of David Hume : an inquiry into the polemical intent of behind Hume's political writings

Abstract

In the mid twentieth century David Hume is studied more as a philosopher than as a writer on history and politics. In his own day, however, this was far from being the case. The Annual Register for 1776, when it came to evaluate Hume's major achievement as a man of letters following his death in the summer of that year, made it clear that it considered that if he were to retain his reputation as 'a writer unequalled in his age, or in his province, one of the most eminent and extensive in the empire of science', he would do so primarily as a historian rather than as a philosopher. The Treatise of Human Nature, the most systematic of all his works, had been 'entirely overlooked, or decried at the time of its publication, except by a few liberal-minded men'. Indeed, by 1776 copies of the Treatise had become so 'very scarce' that the Annual Register deemed it proper to restate some of its central doctrines. Hume's History of England, on the other hand, was 'a favourite performance', a state of affairs which the Annual Register considered to be entirely proper; it felt that this work, 'taken as a whole, ... may be considered as one of the most excellent productions of human genius, and is certainly the greatest historical work of modern times'.