Introduction

Summary

The politics of David Hume's lifetime, 1711–76, is often seen as the ‘growth of stability’, as the shoring up of the complacent British ancien régime and the securing of the first British empire. These perceptions are by no means entirely changed if we look at the period through Hume's eyes, but they are significantly modified. Hume's writings on politics, especially his essays, convey a sense of the fragility and uncertainty of the politics that created the high-Georgian establishment of his later years. And when he died in the late summer of 1776, he had clear premonitions of the jolt that this establishment was about to receive from across the Atlantic. Hume's understanding of the transitory nature of politics was not only the result of his acute observation of Britain and Europe and his unusual historical sense; it was also based on a complex political philosophy, a crucial point of which was that public opinion is fundamental to all political authority. This convergence of political observation, historical insight and philosophical theory formed Hume's political opinion. By publishing it, he hoped to have a formative influence on the public opinion that was constitutive of politics. At the same time he presented posterity with a particularly inviting, if difficult, task of interpretation.

Hume's political situation

When Hume was born, Britain was still ruled by a daughter of the last Stuart king. Queen Anne, like her sister Mary before her, offered some comfort to those who saw the removal of James II at the Revolution in 1689 as sacrilege against the doctrine of the indefeasible hereditary right of succession in kings.