Hume

Great Political Thinkers series

Edited by John Dunn, Fellow, Kings College and Professor of Political Theory, University of Cambridge, UK and Ian Harris, Department of Politics, University of Leicester, UK

The work of David Hume (1711–76), the Scottish historian and philosopher, constitutes a break with the assumptions of his predecessors who ssuggested that our ideas and practices answered to a rational design, whether divine or human. Instead Hume emphasized the origins of our ideas in sensation, suggested that reason was properly the slave of the passions, and located the origins of social and political institutions in utility and sentiment.