This volume on Hume's politics brings together essays that have been formative of the scholarly and more general debate about Hume's political thought. The articles span a wide range of view-points such as: the possibilities of seeing in Hume both the conservative and the liberal; Hume's sophisticated analysis of party-politics and of commerce and politics; his ideas of the international order and his fundamental theory of justice in relation to law, property and government.

Knud Haakonssen is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and University College London, UK. Richard Whatmore is Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought, and Director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, University of Sussex, UK.

Contents: Introduction; Hume's political science and the classical republican tradition, James Moore; Hume and the contexts of politics, Richard H. Dees; David Hume and the conservative tradition, Donald W. Livingston; The public interest vs. old rights, John B. Stewart; Hume and Madison on faction, Mark G. Spencer; Selfish and moral politics: David Hume on stability and cohesion in the modern state, Jeffrey Church; David Hume's political philosophy: a theory of commercial modernization, Carl Wennerlind; Hume, modern patriotism, and commercial society, A.B. Stilz; The European, or cosmopolitan, dimension in Hume's science of politics, Duncan Forbes; Laws not men: Hume's distinction between barbarous and civilized government, Neil McArthur; David Hume and the Common Law of England, Neil McArthur; Utility and humanity: the quest for the honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson and Hume, James Moore; Hume's 'original difference': race, national character and the human sciences, Aaron Garrett; Hume's theory of justice and property, James Moore; Hume's obligations, Knud Haakonssen; Hume's account of social artifice - its origins and originality, Annette Baier; Artificial virtues and the Sensible Knave, David Gauthier; Artificial virtues and the equally Sensible non-Knaves: a response to Gauthier, Annette C. Baier; Motive and obligation in Hume's ethics, Stephen Darwall; Hume's Knave and the interests of justice, Jason Baldwin; The first motive to justice: Hume's circle argument squared, Don Garrett; The shackles of virtue: Hume on allegiance to government, Rachel Cohon; Hume's critique of the contract theory, Stephen Buckle and Dario Castiglione; Name index.