Since the nineteenth century, two narratives have predominated in scholarly studies of David Hume. According to the first, Hume doggedly pursued fame and fortune. He began as a philosopher, but quickly abandoned that pursuit for more lucrative prospects as an essayist and as an historian. According to the second narrative, Hume began to develop a ‘science of man’ in his Treatise of Human Nature, then systematically worked that project out in his later works. In Hume: An Intellectual Biography, James Harris argues that both narratives impede the development of an accurate account of Hume's intellectual development because both afford an unduly privileged place to Hume's Treatise. According to the first narrative, the Treatise marked the end of Hume's career as a philosopher. According to the second, it is the foundation for everything that Hume wrote afterwards.
Harris's book develops an alternative account of Hume's intellectual development through a detailed study of his writings in chronological order. According to this narrative, Hume is properly understood as a man of letters: a man for whom philosophy was ‘a style of thought and of writing rather than a subject matter or body of doctrine’ (p. 24). Harris's Hume wrote on a wide range of philosophical, moral, historical, political, economic, and social questions. He pursued no systematic programme, but neither did he radically alter course after the publication of the Treatise. According to Harris, what connects all of Hume's works is their author's philosophical, impartial style of reasoning. Harris presses his readers to consider Hume's various writings on their own terms, without any requirement to relate those works back to the Treatise. Hume: An Intellectual Biography is an accessible, engaging, and detailed scholarly study that should appeal to a wide readership. It is a remarkable contribution to Hume scholarship.
Harris devotes chapters 1 and 2 to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Only four letters survive from the first twenty-three years of Hume's life. And we have none of Hume's notebooks from the period 1735–7, when he was writing Books I and II of the Treatise in France. Therefore, Harris argues, the intellectual biographer can, at best, propose ‘a narrative that makes some sense of how it might have been that a young man living in relative obscurity in the Scottish Borders conceived of a book as extraordinarily ambitious as A Treatise of Human Nature’ (p. 37). Despite the limited documentary evidence, however, Harris constructs a compelling narrative that presents the Treatise as having grown out of a tension between the works of Francis Hutcheson and Bernard Mandeville.
A key element of this narrative is the significance that Harris attributes to the nervous breakdown that Hume suffered in the autumn of 1729 after a prolonged period of intense study. Harris's presentation of Books I and II hinges significantly on Hume's claim in the Advertisement to Book I that ‘the subjects of the understanding and passions make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves’. Hume's breakdown, Harris argues, left him convinced that attempts to exercise complete rational control over one's emotions was both dangerous and contrary to human nature. Therefore, Hume set about to develop a brand new and systematic theory of the mind. Books I and II of the Treatise, Harris argues, develop ‘Hume's version of the doctrine of natural sociability’ (p. 115). Book III presents ‘a new way to think about the moral basis of politics’ (p. 131).
The persuasiveness of Harris's narrative depends, in no small measure, on his explanation of Hume's turn to essay writing. The competing narratives to which Harris is responding hold either that this is the point in Hume's intellectual development where he greedily abandoned philosophy for more lucrative prospects as an essayist or, alternatively, where he began to systematically work out the science of man project for which the Treatise was foundational. Harris's answer to the first narrative is that Hume actually began writing and circulating essays before the publication of Book III of the Treatise (October 1740) and, therefore, before he could possibly have judged the Treatise to be a financial failure. His answer to the second rests heavily on Hume's injunction to his readers, published in the Advertisement to the first volume of his Essays, Moral and Political (1741), that they treat each of the essays as independent works and that they not look for any single thread to connect them.
In chapter 3, Harris develops useful discussions of Hume's early essays, drawing attention to Hume's tendency in these works to ‘negotiate a middle way between extreme opposites’ (p. 155). Early in chapter 4, we read an account of Hume's failure to secure an academic post at the University of Edinburgh. Harris provides a detailed reading of A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh – Hume's response to the charges levelled against his candidacy for the professorship by William Wishart, and subsequently published as a pamphlet by Henry Home (Lord Kames) in May of 1745 – to illuminate how Hume sought to present his philosophy when he recast significant portions of the Treatise in the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume's philosophy, Harris writes, ‘was both precisely and rigorously argued, and also engaged with the business of the world, determined . . . to make additions to our stock of knowledge in subjects of importance’ (p. 304).
Chapters 6 and 7 are primarily devoted to Hume's History of England. Harris begins by setting out the historiographical and political contexts for Hume's History. He provides a neat survey of predominant competing accounts of English history and then deftly relates those competing accounts to the British party politics of Hume's day. Of particular significance for Hume, Harris writes, was the reversal of positions that occurred in the 1720s and early 1730s when Henry St John (Earl of Bolingbroke), leading the Tory opposition to Robert Walpole's Whig government, co-opted the trope of the ancient constitution from Whig historiography to claim that Walpole's government was violating ancient British liberties. Harris's account of the complex intertwining of historiography and party politics in eighteenth-century British politics is valuable because, on the one hand, it forms a necessary background for making sense of Hume's History, and, on the other hand, because Hume decided not to provide his readers with that background, opting to break with the standard practice of acknowledging and critiquing the general histories that he sought to supplant with his own. As Harris notes, Hume wanted to present his own History as a ‘fresh start’, as other than ‘just another move in an ongoing political argument’ (p. 327).
Harris's treatment of the History is one of the true highlights of his book. Though the work was a smashing bestseller in Hume's day, and though it remained the standard history of England well into the nineteenth century, it is read with alarming infrequency today, even by Hume scholars. Harris's account of this monumental work elegantly traces its central lines of argument, along with their political and historiographical significance, in a manner sure to induce some of his readers to spend time reading Hume's History for themselves.
Chapter 8 explores the last thirteen years of Hume's life. During this period, Hume spent time as a diplomat in Paris and held the position of Deputy Secretary of State in the Northern Department in London. He famously offered refuge to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, only to have one of the most spectacular fallings out of the eighteenth century. He continued to edit his writings, and made arrangements to ensure the posthumous publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Harris gives an account of Hume's last published work, before turning in the Afterword to Hume's death. James Boswell's incredulity at Hume's unwillingness to recant his sceptical principles, even from his deathbed, has been much discussed, as has Adam Smith's famous portrayal of his best friend, facing death cheerfully and contentedly, and even jokingly urging Charon to give him a little more time so that he might witness the downfall of the prevailing systems of superstition that he had spent his life attempting to undermine. Harris adds to these accounts by offering a picture of Hume at the end of his life, having accomplished all that he set out to accomplish, not specifically as a philosopher, or as an historian, or an essayist, but as a man of letters.
In many respects, Harris's project is a remarkable success. Bolstering his accounts of Hume's various writings in their several editions with passages from Hume's correspondence with his friends, book publishers, and even his critics, Harris offers his readers valuable insights into Hume's practices as a writer. We come to appreciate, as Harris puts it, that, ‘correction was as important a part of Hume's literary life as composition was. No book was ever finished. It was always in the process of being improved’ (p. 23). Hume's preoccupation with revisions and with securing the publication of subsequent editions of his works, especially the Essays, right up to the end of his life, offers powerful support for Harris's central claim that the Treatise occupied no particularly privileged place in Hume's conception of his own corpus. It also provides strong justification for Harris's decision to devote as many pages of his book as he does to the Essays and to the History.
Harris's narrative opens many exciting and promising doors of analysis (sometimes giving his readers a helpful shove through them). However, in some respects, the narrative of Hume as a man of letters, though intended to release Hume's readers from the shackles of ‘Treatise first’ lines of interpretation, is more constraining than Harris might want to admit. To take but two illustrative examples, we may look to Harris's treatments of Hume's failed candidacies for academic posts at the Universities of Edinburgh (1744–5) and Glasgow (1751–2), and his discussion of a letter that Hume wrote to his nephew in 1775.
With regard to the two university posts, Harris's claim is that Hume never really wanted either. This argument is certainly convenient for developing Harris's more general argument about Hume's preoccupation with remaining unconstrained in addressing questions he found curious and significant. However, while Harris's claim that Hume never really wanted the Glasgow chair is somewhat persuasive, he is far less persuasive when he argues that Hume never wanted the Edinburgh chair. Certainly, the job would have constrained Hume in some ways. And, once he was passed over for the position, Hume might well have adopted a ‘glass half full’ view of his situation claiming, as he did, that he ‘never was very fond of the office’ (p. 209). But none of this strikes me as convincing evidence that Hume never wanted the job in the first place. And, there seems to be plenty of evidence that he did really want it. One angle that Harris might have considered, and that would have been highly relevant to his portrayal of Hume as a man of letters, is the advantage, money aside, that Hume would have enjoyed in trying to persuade his readership of some of his more controversial arguments had he been able to write as ‘David Hume, Professor of Moral Philosophy’. After all, in the Letter from a Gentleman, Hutcheson is referenced by his professorial title, it seems to me, precisely to bolster the argument of the Letter with the weight of Hutcheson's academic reputation. However, in order to pursue this line of enquiry, Harris would have had to allow the possibility that his narrative overstates Hume's commitment to independence.
A different constraint is evident in Harris's cursory discussion of Hume's 1775 letter to his nephew in which he claims that republican forms of government are only suited to small states. In a footnote, Harris acknowledges that this claim entirely reverses Hume's discussion in ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, and he describes the letter as ‘puzzling’ (p. 433, n. 112). But, somewhat startlingly, he leaves it there. It seems to me that the letter calls out much more forcefully for an explanation than is suggested by Harris's footnote. If, late in life, Hume actually did reverse his position on the small republic thesis, that would be big news indeed, especially in an account of his intellectual development. This case highlights a possible pitfall in Harris's approach to reading Hume's writings as the various works of a man of letters. Harris's repeated emphasis on the lack of system in Hume's writings licenses the unwarranted acceptance of some apparent inconsistencies in his works. It impedes important lines of analysis and gets parts of the main story wrong.
Nevertheless, Harris deserves enthusiastic praise for the rich and engaging account of Hume's intellectual development in Hume: An Intellectual Biography. The book will be of great interest to Hume specialists, be they philosophers, political scientists, historians, or even economists, as well as to students, scholars, and others interested in Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, or intellectual history more generally.
