Hume Studies

Reflecting Subjects offers a bold and original reading of Book 2 of the Treatise, and presents a problem that has been little explored by Hume scholarship. Jacqueline Taylor's book argues that we can reconstruct what she calls a "social theory" out of Book 2 of the Treatise. Based on a detailed account of the passions that constitute social selves, the social theory of the Treatise offers, according to Taylor, rich and fine-grained explanations of the causes of difference and inequality among human beings, based on understanding the characters of individuals, their social statuses, and their differences in power. However—and this is one of the central problems that Reflecting Subjects seeks to tackle—in Book 3 of the Treatise, Hume uses the same moral psychology developend in Book 2 to build an account of ethics, in which human beings are to be considered as equals. In her reading, this generates a tension between the moral psychology of Book 2, which is particularly sensitive to the way emotions are related to the variability of social practices and social statuses, and the account of morals in Book 3, which seems to disregard this social complexity in explaining moral judgment. As she puts it, in the third Book of the Treatise, "Hume neglects the social inequalities he has examined and instead appears to regard all persons as having more or less equal moral standing."¹

Taylor argues that Hume eases this tension in his mature work. She claims that, in the second Enquiry and the Essays, Hume makes fundamental changes to his earlier moral theory, in order to produce a "more sophisticated" account of morals that take too moral evaluations as a kind of social practice (ibid). Reflecting Subjects sees the mature Hume as perfecting his earlier social theory by producing a more coherent account of the connection between social theory, moral psychology, and ethics. [End Page 169]

In the first chapter, Taylor argues that Hume abandons a common early-modern strategy of providing teleological explanations of the passions, and embraces an account solely based on an analysis of their efficient causes. She carefully shows that, once we properly understand what methodological experimentalism meant in the early-modern period, we can see that Hume's account of the passions was faithful to the project announced in the title of the Treatise: that of introducing "the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects." In this initial chapter, Taylor reaches the central conclusion that the elimination of teleological explanations and the adoption of experimentalism turn Hume's account of the passions into something that goes well beyond the limits of moral psychology and can be appropriately labelled a "robust social theory" (Reflecting Subjects, 31). Hume's robust social theory is one that focuses on how social institutions, understood as historically and culturally determined, are crucial for shaping human nature and engendering social roles and relations.

Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to present in detail the social theory that Taylor sees as pivotal to Book 2 of the Treatise. These chapters provide a fascinating analysis of how the indirect passions, together with the mechanism of sympathy, serve to explain a great number of significant social phenomena: the generation of social statuses, the production of wealth, the distribution of property, the transmission of cultural values and attitudes, and the existence of different forms of social power. In this short piece, I cannot begin to do justice to the richness of Taylor's work in these chapters. But I would like to underscore here the originality and the importance of her reconstruction of Hume's social theory. This reconstruction provides a new and refreshing angle for reading Book 2 of the Treatise; and the meticulous analysis of a wide range of social phenomena will provide future scholars with very useful materials to further advance this kind of reading.

Two other important claims are put forward in these two chapters. The first is that the theory of sympathy cannot be reduced to Hume's associationism. There is much more to it (Reflecting Subjects, 48). For example, Taylor rightly draws attention to the...