Hume Studies

This meticulous work, the product of years of scholarship and effort, contains a great deal to admire. It rightly rejects the frame, still common in philosophy departments, of Hume as someone who, after writing the Treatise, "abandoned philosophy" (with the possible exception of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion) for the sake of lesser inquiries like politics and history. It convincingly portrays Hume's vast classical learning as devoted, in the end, to modern conversations and modern purposes, not to the pursuit of ancient wisdom as directly therapeutic for individuals (194). It deftly places Hume's work not in a narrow Scottish or English context, but in the larger conversation of European letters, proving that Hume himself sought a central place in that conversation. It traces Hume's pervasive anti-Providentialism throughout works that are not usually read as evidence for it, drawing a portrait of Hume as the "disenchanted" thinker par excellence (382). Impressively mastering a great many works, it demonstrates how Hume endorsed central insights of the Tory historians Robert Brady and Thomas Carte, while rejecting their Tory conclusions. And it is outstanding on the details of Hume's multiple revisions and the contexts that evoked them, in particular on the ways in which the libertarian and anti-Scottish "Wilkes and Liberty" movement provoked both despairing letters to friends and substantial revisions to Hume's Essays and History of England.

All that said, I do differ substantially with the book's approach. Its emphasis on historical context, however welcome with respect to some of the questions above, leads it to assess Hume's work in narrow ways that often obscure the substance of what Hume was trying to say. Its determination to characterize Hume's "philosophical" project as a matter of promoting thoughtful, polite discourse, rather than as a search for enduring truths, both distorts [End Page 17] Hume's own proclaimed purposes and slights his permanent contributions. To focus on my own fields of expertise, Hume's history and political science: Harris's central thesis obscures the extent to which Hume sought a political science that would establish reliable laws (corrigible through "experience," i.e. data) and wanted to produce a history that would not just defuse partisan myths of his time, but also be worth reading far into the future. Yet more specifically: in evaluating Hume's History mostly through the lens of how it subverted Tory and Whig myths, Harris's work ends up unable to see—indeed, determined to deny—that Hume replaced those myths with a substantive account of political authority to which history, time, and experience remained central.

In general, I worry that this book makes Hume's life seem both more adverbial than it was, and more ephemeral. It portrays a Hume more devoted to promoting polite, judicious ways of thinking, conversing, and writing than to establishing—through systematic thought and empirical evidence—durable, often difficult, truths.