This contribution surveys the essays in political economy that Hume began to publish in 1752, with particular attention to his thinking about money. The essays are presented as, in part, extensions of the natural history of property and government that Hume began to sketch in A Treatise of Human Nature. But they were also carefully calibrated interventions in the political discourse of trade and finance prominent in British politics since the seventeenth century. Hume’s political economy can be situated in a range of British and European intellectual and political contexts. This chapter pays particular attention to his recurrent engagement with John Locke’s extensive writings on money, trade and taxation, which served Hume as a foil in developing his own positions. There is, it will be suggested, a deep connection between Hume’s celebrated critique of Locke’s account of the original contract and his rejection of Locke’s search for an invariable monetary standard.

This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

This chapter traces the ways in which Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ responds not only to Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) but also to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). The large federal constitution that Hume proposed at the end of his Political Discourses turns out to have as much in common with Montesquieu’s understanding of modern monarchy as it does with Harrington’s vision for an equal republic. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that Montesquieu’s criticism of Oceana in his chapter ‘On the English Constitution’ prompted Hume to devise his alternative version of Harrington’s commonwealth. Hume adapted Oceana’s framework for uniform electoral districts and tiers of representation to the spirit of commerce and competition that he and Montesquieu associated with modern Britain. The result was a state with ‘all the advantages of both a great and little commonwealth’.

The chapter explores how Hume’s Essays were received in Germany during the eighteenth century, highlighting the cultural exchange and intellectual shifts of that time. Hume’s influence is analysed in the context of the growing interest in English books and culture in Germany during the eighteenth century, a trend known as ‘Anglophilia’. Hume’s political and economic writings were translated into German shortly after their original publication. His name was held in high regard and his writings were considered to be instructive. But the specifics of cameralism prevented his economic and political essays from having a major impact on German discourse. Nonetheless, new translations continued to appear. In the German reform debate of the late eighteenth century, Hume’s Essays were used to both support the status quo and to advocate for political change. In the early nineteenth century, an academic translation of Hume’s essay was published, acknowledging his contribution to the formation of political economy as a science. By exploring the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Germany, the chapter shows how translations not only played a big role in sharing knowledge during the Enlightenment but also reflected cultural differences.

The role of France in David Hume’s intellectual biography is difficult to overestimate. He visited that country three times, wrote the Treatise in La Flèche, and reached the peak of his success during the years he spent in Paris (1763–66), where he was welcomed as a highly valuable member of the Republic of Letters. He cared greatly about the circulation of his writings in France, and actually succeeded in establishing his reputation across the Channel. The History of England made him an outstanding historian, the Natural History of Religion an authoritative esprit fort, but it was the Essays that confirmed him as a subtle political thinker and, what he cared about most, as a profound philosopher in the eyes of his French readers. Before and besides being translated in the form of collections, many of Hume’s essays were translated, summarised, commented on, reviewed, and discussed individually, giving rise to a complex and divergent reception. The present chapter provides an overview of this reception, based on first-hand research on eighteenth-century French translations, reviews, commentaries and criticisms of the Essays.

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

This chapter studies Goldsmith’s extensive work in the genre of history writing – his histories of England, Greece and Rome – in the context of Enlightenment historiographical trends. The accessibility of his histories is considered as a cause of the continued currency of his histories in the nineteenth century, and of their ongoing commercial and publishing success.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

David Hume’s famous argument against believing miracle reports exemplifies several key issues relating to the emergence of modern naturalism. Hume uncritically assumes the universal and unproblematic nature of core conceptions such as ‘supernatural’ and ‘laws of nature’. Hume’s argument also presents him with a dilemma. He relies upon the weight of testimony to establish his case against believing miracle reports, but must also contend with the weight of testimony, across different times and cultures, to the existence of the supernatural. Hume resolves this by an appeal to historical progress accompanied by a dubious racial theory. These enable him to discount testimonies emanating from the past and from other cultures. ‘Hume’s dilemma’ has not gone away and, if anything, is even more acute since the traditions and beliefs of non-Western cultures are now more difficult to dismiss on the basis of dubious historical accounts of Western exceptionalism. This dilemma amounts to a tension between the ethics of belief and the demands of epistemic justice.

This chapter argues that neither global legal pluralism nor global constitutionalism can properly answer our question of how we can know who has the final say on the relationship between international, EU and national law. Most advocates of global legal pluralism do not sufficiently distinguish between the description of factual developments, and, as a different issue, the question of how we ought to deal with or even solve legal conflicts (based on a (common) framework) resulting from plural, overlapping legal claims. Universalist solutions, as presented by global constitutionalists, are likely to fall short of acknowledging the inevitable restrictions of context which are in place when dealing with legal norm conflicts on a global scale. Global constitutionalism has to face the burden of universality, which is an unsurmountable challenge (except for some very fundamental norms, namely ius cogens or a thin layer of global constitutionalism). With constitutional pluralism, however, we are likely to end up in a “constitutional stalemate.”

Chapter three analyses the period between 1650 and 1800. Many thinkers see The Enlightenment’ as intoxicated with ideas of reason, control and with building perfect knowledge, organizations and societies. I demonstrate that this view is exaggerated. The ravages of wars produced two opposed intellectual movements: on the one hand, natural law and rationalism whose adherents believed in certain knowledge and abstract schemes; on the other, thinking in terms of probabilities, which recognizes and accommodates uncertainty. Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu saw the limits of human reason and foresight and made considerable room for uncertainty. Military thinkers cautioned that war is unpredictable and that systematic knowledge is a pipe dream. Uncertainty and unpredictability occupied the centre stage in European culture; in paintings, the picaresque novel and the popularity of gambling and betting. This era was much contested as three different world views established themselves: The idea that the world could be understood and predicted, the sense that it is entirely uncertain and a pragmatic world view that recognizes and accommodates uncertainty as a part of the world.

This chapter discusses centrism as another face of moderation. It distinguishes between various meanings of centrism and makes a connection between a vital center and political moderation. It also considers a few concrete topics on which a centrist agenda is possible and desirable.