Hume on economic policy and human nature

Hume Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 143-157

  Soule, Edward ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953723102     PISSN: 03197336     EISSN: 19479921     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hms.2011.0201     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Subsequently referred to as "T."
2. Originally published in Political Discourses, a twelve-essay collection of 1753. All parenthetical references are to page numbers assigned to "Of Commerce" in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene E Miller (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985).
3. T. Velk and A. R. Riggs provide a good synopsis of Hume's economic project in "David Hume's Practical Economics," Hume Studies 11 (1985): 154-165.
4. This much overworked and potentially misleading word is the term of choice for Marcus Ar kin, "The Economic Writings of David Hume: A Reassessment," South African Journal of Economics 24 (1956): 204-220
5. reprinted in Mark Blaug (ed.), Pioneers in Economics: David Hume (1711-1766) and James Steuart (1712-1780) (London: Edward Elgar, 1991), 71-87. Arkin takes note of contrasting modes of production such as "enclosures and open-fields, nascent factories and 'putting-out' industries."
6. Joyce Appleby focuses on two stunning developments during this period: the "freedom from famine" and the fact that the supply of goods grew faster than the population. See her "Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought," in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 162-176.
7. See W. W. Rostow, Theories of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
8. William Doyle, The Old European Order 1660-1800, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
9. See Robert W. McGee, "The Economic Thought of David Hume," Hume Studies 15 (1989): 184-204.
10. See Jacob Viner, "Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," World Politics 1 (1948): 1-29
11. reprinted in Mark Blaug (ed.), Pioneers in Economics: The Later Mercantilists (London: Edward Elgar, 1991), 77-105.
12. Mark Blaug (ed.), Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11.
13. "Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought," 165.
14. Also, see L. P. Curtis, Anglican Moods of the Eighteenth Century (Archon Books, 1996), 4.
15. See Lorna Weatherill, "The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England," in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 207.
16. History would prove Hume correct in the connection he makes between consumption and economic output. Based on contemporary economic research, "it was domestic consumption, not foreign trade, that sustained England's manufacturing expansion in the eighteenth century" (Appleby, "Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought," 165).
17. David Hume, The History of England, abridged and with an introduction by Rodney Kilcup (University of Chicago Press, 1975), xx.
18. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 301-302
19. One of the bolder recent accounts is Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
20. see Eugene Rotwein (ed.), David Hume: Writings on Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), xxxiii.
21. see Eugene Rotwein, "David Hume, Philosopher-Economist," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1976): 117-134.
22. This position is echoed in Arkin, "The Economic Writings of David Hume," and as well in Henry Aiken (ed.), Hume's Moral and Political Philosophy (New York: Hafner Press, 1948).
23. See T II, "Of the Passions."
24. see Francis Snare, Morals, Motivation, and Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1991), especially ch. 4, "The Humean Theory of Motivating Reasons."
25. see Eduardo G. Da Fonseca, Beliefs in Action (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
26. See Herbert Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
27. E. J. Hundert, "The Achievement Motive in Hume's Political Economy," Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 139-143.