Introduction

Summary

The objective of this Critical Guide is to provide a series of in-depth studies on the Essays of David Hume, as well as an account of the state of scholarship. In Hume’s lifetime, the Essays acquired considerable éclat throughout Europe and North America; they influenced the writings of such diverse figures as James Madison and William Paley, and they have since become a staple of undergraduate and graduate curricula in history, politics, and philosophy. Yet the Essays have received comparatively modest attention in the scholarship of Hume’s life and thought. The early tradition of Hume’s intellectual biography, pioneered by J. Y. T. Greig and Ernest Campbell Mossner, subordinated the Essays to Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries as monuments of Hume’s contribution to the history of philosophy. This tendency diminished in the 1970s and 1980s, when Duncan Forbes, J. G. A. Pocock and Istvan Hont placed the Essays at the heart of their studies of Hume’s political thought and political economy. The significance of the Essays in James Harris’s Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015) bears witness to the importance that the work has since acquired in general reconstructions of Hume’s intellectual commitments. However, there is no ‘critical guide’ to Hume’s Essays in any language, with recent studies having focused more restrictively on Hume’s political economy. This book is intended to address this absence by providing scholars and students with a wide-ranging and accessible overview of the Essays. The recent publication of the Clarendon Edition of Hume’s Essays (E (C)) is timed propitiously. The extraordinary editorial work of Professor Beauchamp and Professor Box has provided an unparalleled resource for the interpretation of the Essays, with a rich apparatus and a granular account of the complex history of the work’s publication. This Critical Guide has benefitted enormously from their labours.