Hume and the "Vulgar": Commercial Citizens in the Global Eighteenth Century

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

David Hume was often vexed with the "vulgar.” He used this derogative, at various points in his career, to disparage vulgar philosophers who believe in simple causation, those who assume the naturalness of justice, residents of monasteries, and partisans of Oliver Cromwell. However, Hume centered his own Political Discourses around what he called “vulgar subjects”—or “commerce, money, interest, balance of trade,&c.” Hume added that his approach was more “refined and subtle” than we might expect from such economic matters. Yet, in locating the “greatness of a state” in the greatness of its citizens' capacity for commerce, Hume does seem to cede political power to the vulgar. This panel invites comparisons between Hume and other political writers who were preoccupied with modernity’s vulgar passions—namely, Niccolò Machiavelli and Bernard Mandeville.

There is evidence Hume adopted certain neo-Epicurean ideas found in Machiavelli and Mandeville, even if he sought to downplay their political influence or put their thought toward non-obvious economic lessons. This panel asks whether there is a populist upshot in putting Hume in conversation with two of political history’s most notorious writers. If recent reinterpretations of Machiavelli are correct and he was indeed an advocate for the popolo, what, economic lessons (if any) might Machiavelli's eighteenth-century readers have drawn? Did the popular passions privileged by Machiavelli and his admirers rub off on Mandeville and Hume? Panelists reconsider how the legacy of late-humanist and early Reformation thought offers a potential defense of the “middling” tradesman.

Some years ago, Donald Livingston made a case for interpreting Hume’s work as a “philosophy of common life.” In light of more recent studies of Hume’s political economy and a revived interest his History of England—further aided by populist reevaluations of Machiavelli and Mandeville—this panel investigates how Hume’s discussion of commonness bore on the experience of life in the rapidly globalizing eighteenth-century: Did common religious enthusiasms represent a political danger, or were they a resource for institutional reform? Likewise, to what extent did vulgar prejudices become a vulnerability in inter-state competition? Were republican states in the best position to channel their citizens’ “superfluous hands” toward industry and, if need be, toward public safety? Or had luxury economies rendered classical political forms irrelevant? Perhaps only civilized monarchies could efficiently employ their subjects as artisans and/or soldiers. Finally, do Hume’s concessions to the “vulgar” undercut Duncan Forbes’ sense that Hume was a basically “cosmopolitan” thinker? Or is cooperation between vulgar tradesmen the main criterion on which Hume rests his hope for a modern cosmopolitan order?

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Chair

• Danielle Charette University of Chicago

Discussants

• Richard Boyd Georgetown University

• Andrew Sabl University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Mandeville and the “Low" - Brandon Turner, Clemson University

• David Hume's "Mercenary Strangers" - Danielle Charette, University of Chicago

• Religion, Revolution, and Individualism in Hume’s History of England - Thomas Merrill, American University