David Hume and the Ideas That Shaped America

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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[jmxy]

David Hume was accused of many things throughout his life, some of them a little bit contradictory. He was accused of being atheist (which probably wasn't wrong), despite being very negatively impressed by the dogmatic rationalism of the Parisian _philosophes_ that he met. He was accused of beintg a Jacobite, or of harboring sympathies for Jacobitism, which may sound harmless today, but in his time it was a serious accusation of treason (to the Hanoverian Dynasty, which ruled England) and was used in the polemics of the time.

Anyway, I do feel somewhat compelled to defend Thomas Jefferson's dislike of Hume, as Hume's historical and political writings could justly be interpreted as making a powerful argument against revolution in general and the American Revolution of independence in particular (which was, after all, Thomas Jefferson's main political concern, whereas James Madison, a much younger man than Jefferson, was concerned with establishing and consolidating an already independent American State). I don't see how Thomas Jefferson, who himself was kind of freethinking rationalist in the French style (and a dangerous atheist, if one is to believe Jefferson's opponents) could possibly object to Huime's criticisms of religion and religiosity. If anything, Jefferson might have found those criticisms to have been too mild, as the French philosophes certainly thought.

I mean, after Hume's death, his writings on the English Civil War and Commonwealth were very effectively used to criticize the goings on of the French Revolution, and in many ways Hume anticipates Edmund Burke's harsh arguments against the French revolutionaries and their supporters in England. In the realm of the abstract, David Hume was very critical of social contract or compact theory, and quite justifiedly so, which at the time served to articulate an intellectual justification for American independence (and for other revolutions, including the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish-American revolutions). Other than that, and this is perhaps what turned Thomas Jefferson the most against David Hume, is Hume's (histocrical, factual) criticisms of English and American Whig (libreral) historiography, including everything from the Whigs' ideas about the Anglo-Saxons and the Common Law (Jefferson always prefered Sir Edward Coke), to the Tudor monarchy (and its comparison to the Stuart monarchy), and the English Civil War and Commonwealth. It was not just social contract theory that the American colonists (such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) used in their intellectual and political battles against the British Parliament (and King's) claims to auithority over the American colonies, but also all of the Whiggish interpretation of England's history and institutions, which Hume, like I said, was quite rightly critical of as lacking a factual basis, even with the sources available in Hume's own time, and which he used in his most well-known of his works, the _History of England_ (to his contemporaries, since most people today don't even bother with Hume's History).

[Axiom]

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