David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society ed. by Angela Coventry and Andrew Valls, and: Hume, Passion, and Action by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (review)

For many years, the Hume best known to the academy was the Hume of Book One of the Treatise of Human Nature, the Hume of skeptical doubts about causation and the self—that is, the Hume of metaphysicians and epistemologists in philosophy departments. This Hume lives on of course, but he has been supplemented if not supplanted by a much more comprehensive appreciation of Hume's contributions across a broad range of other fields, including aesthetics, religion, criticism, economics, history, moral philosophy, and political theory. The two books reviewed here are particularly concerned to demonstrate Hume's significance for the related fields of moral philosophy and political theory, yet they do so in very different ways and are indeed meant for different audiences.

David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society is published in Yale University Press's "Rethinking the Western Tradition" series. Like other texts in the series, it is intended for classroom use; Andrew Valls, in the volume's introduction, specifically notes that it was the editors' aim to produce "a volume that may be of use in teaching Hume" (xv). Even so, the volume is unique within the Yale series. Most books in the series are reprints of individual canonical titles, such as Hobbes's Leviathan and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society departs from this general rule, reprinting both Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (the work Hume himself called "incomparably" his best), and twelve essays from Hume's Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. This will be welcome to many teachers of Hume. For while we already have several affordable editions of both texts that are quite serviceable for undergraduate student use—including especially Tom Beauchamp's edition of the Enquiry published in the Oxford Philosophical Texts series, and Eugene Miller's edition of the Essays published by the Liberty Fund—the Yale volume is the first (so far as I know) to bring these together in one volume.

This alone renders the new volume a service to teachers. But the utility of this text for classroom use is also furthered by several additional welcome features. First, the editorial apparatus is light, but informative. Annotations are non-interpretive and provide information that today's students will find very useful in their efforts to navigate Hume, including word definitions, English translations of Hume's citations in Greek, Latin and French, and basic historical information. On this last front, especially to be commended is the inclusion of a thirty-page "Index of Names" providing useful background on the many historical personages invoked by Hume. In addition, the editors deserve credit for their selections from the Essays. One other aim of the volume is to rehabilitate Hume's reputation among political theorists. In his introduction, Valls laments that Hume yet "remains, among political theorists at least, consigned to a subordinate position in the pantheon of modern thinkers" (xi). Surely no single volume could be expected singlehandedly to raise Hume to varsity status, but the essays selected for inclusion here bring into helpful relief Hume's key contributions as a political thinker—contributions that sometimes are difficult to see insofar as they are dispersed across his corpus.

Aside from the primary texts it reprints, the volume is also distinguished by four specially-commissioned essays by notable specialists. The first of these, Mark Spencer's essay on "The Composition, Reception, and Early Influence of Hume's Essays and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals," surveys Hume's life and writings, giving particular attention to the history of the two texts included in the volume. Students will benefit from this survey as well as from Spencer's helpful analysis of a key passage from Hume's "Of Refinement in...