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David Hume, 1711-1776.
Scottish philosopher, historian and economist, sociologist.
David Hume was one of the greatest philosophers in Western history, as well as an accomplished historian and economist. Although the perennial skeptic, David Hume was, by all accounts, a rather good-natured fellow too. Despite lacking an academic perch, David Hume was arguably the most prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment (roughly dated 1740 to 1790) and a close friend of Adam Smith. Hume's contributions to economics are found mostly in his Political Discourses (1752), which were incorporated in 1758 as part of his Essays Moral, Literary and Political.
In his memoir of David Hume, Adam Smith would write: "I have always considered him, both in lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit" (Smith, 1776)Hume was certainly gifted - indeed, most of his ideas had been worked out by the time he was nineteen - but what Fortune bestows with one hand, it often takes away with the other. Born on April 26, 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second son of the lawyer Joseph Home and Katherine Falconer of Ninewells (an estate near Berwick-upon- Tweed). His father, a lawyer, died in 1713 and his mother raised him singlehandedly (Hume changed his name from "Home" to "Hume" in 1731, when he perceived Englishmen having complications with the pronunciation of the Scottish "Home").
Hume enrolled at the university of Edinburgh in 1723 to study law (enrolling at twelve was not too astonishing in that century). In 1727, Hume met his distant relative Henry Home (future Lord Kames) who would become a life-long friend and mentor. However, philosophy and literature called and Hume withdrew from the university in 1729 and dedicated the next eight, long years, marred by illness, depression, frustration and mental breakdown, to the solitary study of that discipline and the construction of his formidable thesis - eventually laid out in his masterpiece A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume's project was complex enough: as the subtitle of his Treatise indicates, he sought to "introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects" - or, more simply, to introduce the scientific methods of the Enlightenment, of Newton and Bacon, to bear on five human subjects. These subjects were to be laid out in five volumes - I (Of the Understanding), II (Of the Passions), III (Of Morals), IV (Of Politics) and V (Of Criticism).
In 1734, seeking respite and restoration (and a bit of money), David Hume went to Bristol, England, to learn the art of commerce. He found work for a few months with a sugar merchant, but soon disappeared to France in the summer of 1734, settling down first at Rheims and then at La Flèche (near the celebrated Jesuit College of Anjou which Descartes had attended), where he set about writing the Treatise. Hume returned to London in the Fall of 1737 to finalize and oversee its publication. Of the envisaged five volumes of the Treatise of Human Nature, only the first three were published: in 1739 (Volumes I and II) and 1740 (Volume III). Hume was then twenty-nine years old. In 1739, while the book was being published, he returned to Scotland, staying with family in Ninewells and Edinburgh.
According to Hume, the anonymously-published Treatise "fell deadborn from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots" (Hume, 1776). This was not exactly true: the zealots disliked it even although he had, in a fit of fright, pulled out his more contentious parts of his Treatise (such as the notorious essay on "Miracles") before publication. Hume concluded that the tepid, if not hostile, reception to the Treatise was due merely to his mode of presentation as opposed to its content. He re-worked the presentation of the arguments in the Treatise into more digestible forms via two "explanatory" tracts: an Abstract lately published (1740) and A Letter from a Gentleman (1745), both directed to refuting the charges of the "zealots". (However, Hume would not put out another edition of the Treatise in his lifetime - indeed, there would be no reprints of it at all until 1818).
Hume had originally envisaged the Treatise as a five-volume work. The first three, I (Of the Understanding), II (Of the Passions) and III (Of Morals), had appeared in 1739-40. The next two volumes, IV (Of Politics) and V (Of Criticism), never saw the light of day However, much of what he sought to write on these topics ended up in two collections of essays on various topics: Essays Moral and Political (1741-42) to which he later added Three Essays (1748). These were, incidentally, the first publications to which Hume explicitly attached his name.
In February 1744, the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh fell vacant with the resignation of John Pringle. The university offered the chair to Frances Hutcheson (then at Glasgow), but Hutcheson declined. So David Hume submitted his candidacy. Appointments to the university were controlled by the Town Council of Edinburgh, which decided to consult several clergymen on Hume's credentials. Conservative Presbyterian clerics found Hume "subversive" and suspiciously irreligious and objected. William Wishart, the Principal of Edinburgh University, circulated a set of "dangerous" propositions found in the Treatise, to which Hume would reply point by point in his A Letter from a Gentleman (Mar 1745, addressed to Kames). But after months of wrangling, Hume's candidacy failed (the position went instead to Pringle's deputy and cleric, William Cleghorn).
In the aftermath of his defeat at the Edinburgh chair, in April, 1745, Hume found employment as the private tutor to the Marquis de Annandale. Hume stayed at the marquis's estate of Weld Hall (near St. Alban's) for a year, but realizing the marquis was half-mad, and his estate manager a crook, Hume managed to eventually extricate himself from that situation. In May 1746, Hume found new employment as assistant to the restless General James St. Clair. With St. Clair, Hume ended up in Brittany, France as Judge Advocate, the bizarre outcome of a hare-brained military expedition originally intended for Canada. They returned to London in June, 1747. The next year, Hume followed St. Clair on embassies to Vienna and Turin in February 1748. Hume returned to Britain by 1749, living in his brother's home in Ninewells, Dundee, for the next two years.
Hume had found time for his philosophical labors while under St. Clair, and during this period wrote two formidable enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, (published Apr, 1748) and an Enquiry into the Principles of Morals (published Nov, 1751). The first clarified his epistemological theory, originally presented in Vol. I of the Treatise, in a clear and accessible manner (and took this opportunity to incorporate his essay "Of Miracles"). The second enquiry did the same for his theory of ethics (which had been Vol. III of the Treatise). He considered this second work "incomparably the best" of all the works he had written.
The Treatise (1739-40) and the both of the Enquiry (1748 & 1751) exposited Hume's basic outlook and his main contributions to the Scottish Enlightenment. He section on morals disputed Hutcheson's theory of morals, which posited that man was endowed with an "innate moral sense"
The publication of Hume's essay "Of Miracles" in his 1748 Enquiry touched off a firestorm. Hume posited that ancient miracles reported in the Holy Bible were as incredulous as miracles more recently reported by superstitious Catholic populations in Europe At first it went largely unnoticed, but his old mentor Henry Home (Lord Kames) had been roused to write his own Essays on Morality in early 1751 disputing some points in Hume's theses on morals, religion and philosophy, that ended up giving Hume's works further publicity. Conservative Presbyterian ministers were particularly incensed by the essay on miracles, and a flurry of articles and pamphlets began to appear in the Spring of 1751 attacking both Hume and "Sopho" (Kames's pseudonym).
In the summer of 1751, Hume left England and finally moved permanently to Edinburgh. At this time, Hume made another attempt at a university post - this time for the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, which was coming vacant in November 1751 with the sudden fatal illness of John Craigie (Hutcheson's successor since 1746). But this was at the height of the miracles controversy, so a confluence of clerical and conservative forces roused to thwart him again. The publication of Hume's Enquiry on Morals in November 1751 did little to calm fears (although wisely Hume refrained from publishing his Dialogues on Natural Religion, which he had largely completed by this time). Hume's good friend Adam Smith (then professor of logic at Glasgow) failed to support his candidacy, apparently out of timidity ("I should prefer David Hume to any man for a colleague; but I am afraid the public would not be of my opinion; and the interest of the society will oblige us to have some regard to the opinion of the public", Smith's letter to Cullen, Nov 1751). The chair would ultimately be offered to Smith himself - or more precisely, Smith was transferred from logic to moral philosophy in early 1752, and Hume's bid was re-oriented to succeeding Smith in the vacated logic chair. But it failed regardless (the logic chair ended up going to John Clow).
As consolation, in January, 1752, David Hume secured a position as librarian to the College of Advocates in Edinburgh. Although its emolument was relatively modest (£40 a year), the Library of Advocates was one of the larger libraries in Britain, boasting over thirty thousand volumes, and a gathering point for researchers and scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment. That same year, Hume put another volume of essays, Political Discourses (Feb, 1752) which contain most of his contributions to economics. The three collections of essays were eventually placed together in a single volume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary in 1758. As it turns out, this was perhaps his best-received work. Hume's conjectures on population were disputed by Robert Wallace in 1753.
As a librarian, Hume had much time and resources around him, so he set about writing his monumental six-volume History of England (1754-1762), initially published in reverse chronological order. This work was not a new and independent interest of Hume's - rather, he saw it as a continuation of his other work, a "practical application" of his theses on politics. The Essays and the History of England restored much of the reputation he had lost with the Treatise and its aftermath.
The controversy on miracles continued in the meantime, and conservative ministers launched an attempt to get both Hume and "Sopho" proscribed and excommunicated by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland in 1755. But Kames and Hume had sufficient allies among the "Moderate" faction of the Kirk (led by William Robertson and other friends from the "Select Society") and the attempt failed by 1756. But perhaps Hume got too cocky. In February 1757, Hume published his Four Dissertations, which included the famous essay on "the Natural History of Religion", lambasting Deistic "natural religion" (i.e. the then-popular idea that religion can be based on reason and not revelation), arguing instead that religious belief was very much a child of vulgar "superstition and enthusiasm". Hume was toying with fire now. He pressed on nonetheless, completing his highly atheistic Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and two essays, "Of Suicide" and "Of the Immortality of the Soul". But sensing the trouble he was getting into, he suppressed these from publication. Nonetheless, he was pressured to resign his position in the Edinburgh library in 1757.
In October, 1763, Hume left the world of books and returned to the world of men, accompanying the British ambassador to France, Lord Hertford, as personal secretary. Hume's reputation preceded him and he was the toast of Enlightenment France. Hume stayed two and a half years in Paris, in connection with the British embassy, even serving as charge d'affaires for several months in 1765. In January, 1766, Hume returned to London bringing along with him the much-persecuted Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau benefited tremendously from Hume's hospitality and protection in England, writing his famous Letters from the Mountain against his critics from Hume's home. But Rousseau's paranoia and bitterness eventually tried even the eternal patience of the good-natured Hume. When they broke in 1767, Hume felt compelled by the swirling rumor-mills to write a tract explaining exactly the cause of his quarrel with Rousseau.
In February 1767, Hume was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department (proto-foreign office), which he holds until 1768. In 1769, rewarded with a state pension, Hume left London for Edinburgh where he would remain until his death. There he lived in philosophical semi-retirement, correcting his earlier works, entertaining his fellow intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment and Mrs. Anne Ord.
Hume fell ill in 1775. After a brief sojourn for a cure in Bath, Hume knew the end was coming, and wrote a short autobiographical notice, My Own Life in 1776, wherein he acknowledged, for the first time, his authorship of the Treatise. Despite a rather prolonged, painful illness, David Hume died on April 26, 1776, at the age of sixty-five, a happy, confirmed atheist until the end (for an account of Hume's last days, see Adam Smith's Letter to Strahan and James Boswell's Journal).
Before his death, Hume instructed Adam Smith to arrange for the publication of his long- suppressed two essays, "Of Suicide" and "Of the Immortality of the Soul" and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The ever-timid Smith refused to go through with it and so did his publisher William Strahan. Finally, his nephew published them in 1777, the Two Essays and the Dialogues appearing without the author's name nor even the publisher's.
In his economic contributions, David Hume was an avowed liberal and a virulent anti-Mercantilist. He was adamant that wealth was measured by the stock of commodities of a nation, not its stock of money. He was also one of the better articulators of the Quantity Theory and the neutrality of money ("It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy", Of Money, 1752). Contrary to the Mercantilists, Hume related low interest rates not to abundant money, but to booming commerce. He was one of the first to spell out the "loanable funds" theory of interest, arguing that interest rates are determined by the demand for loans and the supply of saving. Low interest rates are thus symptoms of a booming, commercial economy, where thrift and the desire for gain and accumulation take hold. However, Hume admitted that in the short-run (and only the short-run), a rising supply of money could have a beneficial effect on industry.
Hume's most famous contributions are in international trade. Contrary to the Mercantilists, he did not conceive of foreign trade as a zero-sum game but argued that there are mutual gains from trade. Hume argued that the total volume of international trade is directly related to the diversity and wealth of all nations. As he concludes, "I shall therefore venture to acknowledge that not only as a man, but as a British subject I pray for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy and even France itself." (Of the Jealousy of Trade, 1758).
Hume also introduced the automatic "price-specie flow" mechanism and the "reflux principle". Its basic argument was to deny the old Mercantilist policy proposition that the inflow of gold specie into a nation could be accomplished by manipulating the external trade balance. Hume argued that the inflow of specie would, by his Quantity Theory, lead to a rise in domestic prices, thereby changing the terms of trade against the recipient nation. The demand for its exports abroad would consequently decline, and its own demand for foreign imports would increase, thereby reversing the external trade balance so that specie now would flow back out. Hume also used this logic to deny the idea that rises in prices can be blamed on rising wages. Specifically, if there was a wage-induced rise in the price level in England, the terms of trade between England and other nations would change in a manner detrimental to English exports and favorable to the imports from other nations. This would thereby induce an outflow of money from England , and thus a reduction in England's money stock which would bring the price level in England back down.
Hume's automatic flow mechanism of international trade lent credence to the idea that there was a "natural balance" of trade between nations which deliberate policy moves could not contradict. But Hume was not a believer of the "natural law" or "social contract" theories popular with contemporary political and social philosophers. He was a thorough empiricist in both his political and philosophical work. His hedonistic theory of morals served as a foundation of utilitarianism. His theories of "evolution" of ethics, institutions and social conventions and were highly influential upon the Hayek and later evolutionary theories.
Hume's essay on miracle would provoke William Paley's 1794 Views of the Evidences.
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