Hume

James Harris’s book, long anticipated by Hume scholars, purports to offer the first intellectual biography of its subject. Unlike Ernest C. Mossner’s classic (in every sense) Life of David Hume (1954, frequently reprinted), Harris’s primary focus is on the ideas rather than the man. Gone are the jovial anecdotes and apocrypha about le bon David which delighted Mossner; gone, too, are the factual inaccuracies which littered Mossner’s text and reappear in the work of students who have relied upon it. Yet Harris’s choice of subtitle also indicates a conviction that there is a story to tell about Hume’s intellectual development over the course of his career as a man of letters (a designation that Harris, like Hume, prefers to that of philosopher). Not all of Hume’s ideas (and not all of his most interesting ones) first appeared in Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), as previous generations of philosophers maintained. Hume’s later writings across a wide range of subjects—politics, economics, civil history, the history and philosophy of religion—are worth studying in their own right, rather than merely as offshoots or extensions of what was already implicit in his ‘philosophy’. In them, Hume intervened in a number of (sometimes discrete) contemporary conversations; yet, taken as a whole, Hume’s œuvre represented an engagement with a broader, transnational conversation underway in Hume’s age, which Harris defines as ‘the Enlightenment’

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