Hume's Philosophical Politics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 231 body and the exterior world." I would argue, on the other hand, that the inner and outer worlds are in correspondence for Edwards precisely because they converge in experience, in the act of perception. By confining his study of Edwards to "the narrow circle of the private, insular self" wherein "God is better revealed.., than in the expanses of the universe," Scheick falls short of seeing his work as a whole in all its richness and diversity. To such a bifurcation between the insular self and nature Edwards would respond with repugnance. Finally, the book leaves one with the lasting impression that Edwards was a tradition-oriented moderate who "sought a via media between the extremes" of the Awakening, a curious but rather minor and unexciting eighteenth-century writer, and certainly not a figure commanding our serious and sustained attention as one who might have something instructive to say to a twentieth-century audience. Miller is still right when he says it would be a "gross misrepresentation of Edwards to present him as a classicist preaching the mean between extremes; he was no Latin, no Stoic--he was a Puritan, an American, and a barbarian. ''2 PAUL J. NAGY lndiana University -Purdue University at Indianapolis Hume's Philosophical Politics. By Duncan Forbes. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 338. $27.50) Forbes argues that Hume undertook a program of political education: first, to provide a theory of political obligation (in the Treatise); second, to explain the science of politics (in the essays); and, third, to write a sound history of England. This program is seen by him (p. x) to have been "an attempt to give the established, Hanoverian, regime a proper intellectual foundation .... "Forbes wants his title taken seriously. His book is not an analysis of Hume's political philosophy, or even of his science of politics; rather, it treats of Hume's attitudes to the great issues of contemporary British politics. The basic thesis of the book is that Hume was consistent: he was always a Whig, never a Tory; and the aim of his program was to justify and support the established Whig order. The first two chapters are the ones that will be of greatest interest to the generality of Hume scholars. Forbes criticizes the traditional view that Hume thought he was doing something quite new when he applied the experimental method to moral subjects. In fact the use of the experimental method had become common; but behind the Newtonians' world stood God. This meant that ultimately the laws of nature which they found by the experimental method were God's imperatives. In contrast, Forbes argues, Hume entered upon his new science of thought when he abandoned completely the design assumption. Moreover, contrary to the common view, Hume is not to be called an enemy of "natural law," unless one restricts that term to those who reason about "eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses." According to Forbes (p. 68), what Hume put before his readers was "an exclusively secular because exclusively empirical (or the other way round) version of the fundamental principles of natural law .... " In other words, Hume produced "a modern theory of natural law." Forbes could have made an even stronger case than he does for this interpretation. Hume's "Of Morals" is largely given over to an examination of the proper relations among men as possessors and traders of external goods, and to the development of the argument that the moral obligation to obey a government is based primarily on its usefulness in upholding property and contracts. But the artificial virtues--those that help maintain ownership and contracts, and oblige men to support good governments--are not the only virtues known to Hume. He discusses virtues other than those directly relevant to the public. In other words, 2Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963),p. 183. 232 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY there are natural relationships which are good and therefore virtuous. By referring to the natural virtues, as well as to the artificial virtues, Forbes could have shown that Hume's theory of natural law is a complete theory, even if not fully developed in all its parts. As it...