Called “a degenerate son of science” by Thomas Jefferson and a “bungling lawgiver” by James Madison, Scottish philosopher David Hume was cited so often at the Constitutional Convention that delegates seemed to have committed his essays to memory. Join Angela Coventry, author of Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed; Dennis Rasmussen, author of The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought; and Aaron Alexander Zubia, author of The Political Thought of David Hume as they discuss Hume’s philosophical legacy and its profound impact on the shaping of America. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Angela Coventry is professor of philosophy at Portland State University. She is the author of two books: Hume’s Theory of Causation: A Quasi-Realist Interpretation and Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed. She has co-edited David Hume: Morals, Politics and Society, with Andrew Valls; The Humean Mind, with Alex Sager; and co-wrote The Historical Dictionary of Hume’s Philosophy, with Kenneth Merrill. Coventry has also served as the vice president and executive secretary-treasurer of the Hume Society, as co-editor of the journal Hume Studies, and as the category editor for "David Hume" at PhilPapers.
Dennis Rasmussen is a professor of political science and the Hagerty Family Fellow at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is also co-director of Syracuse University's Political Philosophy Program and is a senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. He is the author of five books, including The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought; Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders; and most recently, The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter.
Aaron Alexander Zubia is assistant professor of humanities at the University of Florida. He specializes in the moral and political philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American founding. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and Law & Liberty. He is the author of The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Angela Coventry, ed. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects
- Dennis Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
- Aaron Alexander Zubia, The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination
- National Constitution Center Town Hall program, Montesquieu and the Constitution
- Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America
- Hume texts online
- Federalist No. 10
- The Continentalist
- Federalist No. 85
Excerpt from Interview: Aaron Alexander Zubia on Hume's spiritual views and their relationship to his politics?
Aaron Alexander Zubia: Hume wasn't alive at the time of the English civil wars, but the wars of religion. He read the works of Bernard Mandeville and Pierre Bale, he read Hobbes. And so he knew of the violence, the extraordinary violence that occurred in these wars of religion. And liberal political thought is in many ways derived from this attempt to lower the temperature of political discourse to not allow an enthusiastic religious views to intrude upon public political discourse.
At this time, in response to the religious wars, there was a kind of skepticism and an epicureanism that arose. Epicureanism was known in the ancient world for separating politics, morals, and politics from the providential order. It was more empirical in its approach. So Hume is someone who says in the treatise that experience is the only authority on which we can allot and on which we can rely. Madison in Federalist twenties calls experience the, experience the oracle of truth. There's this turn to make politics, I don't wanna say less principled, but I mean less philosophical or certainly less ideological.
One thing I argue in my book is that this attempt to make politics less philosophical required a lot of philosophical maneuvering. That's one thing I think I contribute with this book is showing that, Hume, for someone who wanted to be more practical perhaps in politics, I mean, he wrote a massive tome as you've mentioned Jeff, on the understanding and the passions and morals. I think in modern political thought, I mean, sometimes, in modern life, we take for granted some of these big philosophical moves that were taken during the Enlightenment.
I mean, that's one of the reasons Hume remains this central figure. He was ambitious. He wanted to be heard, and he was heard. I do think that this skeptical epicureanism that arose in the early modern and enlightenment periods was present in Hume. But that's precisely like folks like Madison, they didn't accept that moral and those moral and religious views. So they looked at Hume's political views and his thoughts on public opinion and reliance on experience and observation producing constitutional machinery; these are the things that they really took on board.
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