Beyond Hume

Scholarship over the last 70 years has shown that Madison looked to Hume for insight regarding faction, constitutional attachment, and political methodology. But the now commonplace image of a Humean Madison is misleading. I argue that Madison’s understanding of self-government drew from the science of man articulated in Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy , Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, and Reid’s common sense philosophy. These Scottish sources, all of which were critical of Hume, relied on Butler’s conception of the authoritative conscience. This recovery of Madison’s Scottish sources restores the primacy of reason and conscience in his system, in which the interest-based clash of factions, about which Hume theorized, is a secondary mechanism, always subordinate to the reason-based pursuit of the common good. For Madison and his Scottish sources, the will’s responsiveness to reason is the sine qua non of self-government

Common sense · Conscience · Politics · Scholarship · Scottish Enlightenment · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theory and Influence