Completion of an intellectual biography of David Hume

The book I am writing is the first comprehensive account of Hume's intellectual development. It is, of course, not the first biography of Hume. But it is the first study of the entirety of Hume's career, from his earliest literary experiments to the early philosophical masterpiece A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), and on through a brilliant series of essays on politics and political economy to the six-volume History of England (1754-62). Hume's achievement was, by any standard, extraordinary. Even his detractors, of whom there were many, recognised him as the most important British philosopher and historian of his age. My book sets him in the context of the complex world of British intellectual life at the time when Britain was defining itself into an imperial power, while at the same time keeping open the question of why it is that, of all the literary figures of the mid-eighteenth century, Hume seems to many particularly relevant today.

Different philosophers require different sorts of intellectual biographies, according to the nature of the philosophical career to be described, and according also to the amount and kind of evidence that is available. In Hume's case, there is very little in the way of manuscript material: no student lecture notes, almost no notebooks, and very few relevant letters. What one has to go on are the published works. But those published works themselves present a real challenge to the intellectual biographer, just because they are so apparently different from each other in their subject matter. Hume wrote books that are today a central part of the philosophy curriculum at colleges and universities around the world; he wrote essays on the party political disputes of Britain in the 1740s; he wrote groundbreaking contributions to the developing science of political economy; he wrote sharply and provocatively about the basis of religious belief; he wrote a history of England from the Roman invasion to 1688. The question is whether there is a unitary narrative to be constructed, sufficient to make sense of these various literary endeavours as part of a single intellectual project.

For a long time it was assumed that the answer to this question is No. It was assumed, that is to say, that in early life Hume's ambitions lay in philosophy; that those ambitions were thwarted by the lack of success of Hume's first book, the Treatise of Human Nature; and that after the Treatise Hume turned away from philosophy to more popular kinds of writing (including the presentation of his philosophical ideas in more acceptable and anodyne form). This view of Hume's career has been successfully challenged, and justice has been done to the intellectual seriousness of his later writings, but it continues to be assumed that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between his 'philosophy' and his other texts. I believe that this belief is false. It has its origin, I think, in the relative narrowness of present-day philosophy's conception of itself. For Hume, at any rate, 'philosophy' was not so much a subject-matter or a discipline as a particular style of thinking, a method of analysis, a mode of engagement, such as could be applied to political, economic, religious, and historical problems just as it could be applied to issues in epistemology and ethics. My book is an account of the initial development, subsequent refinement, and full extension this conception of philosophy.

The output of this project will be a book primarily intended for an academic audience. But it is likely that it will in addition secure a readership outwith the academic community. In Scotland at present there is a lively interest in history in general, and in historical figures in particular, and a new biography of Hume will very likely generate a considerable amount of notice. The level of interest can be expected to be affected by events taking place during the Hume tercentenary year of 2011. So the question of what kind of impact this book will have is a real and pertinent one, despite the fact that its readership will be academic in the first instance.

The potential impact of an intellectual biography of Hume lies in part in the capacity it will have to engage its readers in the wider community, especially in Scotland, with the question of the role played by intellectuals in the development of ideas constitutive of modern society. The success of a similar book to my own, Nicholas Phillipson's recent (2010) biography of Adam Smith (Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, Allen Lane/Penguin, 2010), suggests that there is a real interest in the public at large, in Scotland, in the UK more generally, and abroad, in this question.

The book will ask its readers to engage also with the question of cultural and national identities in early modern Britain, and to consider afresh the question of whether a Scottish author may not at the same time properly be regarded as a British author. At a time when the issue of the nature of Scottish nationhood is high on the agenda, the book will have a political resonance, and this should be a further guarantee of its potential to impact on the wide community.

More detailed suggestions as to how to realise this potential for impact are given in the 'Pathways to Impact' attachment.