David Hume's Political Economy

Margaret Schabas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of two monographs, A World Ruled by Number (Princeton, 1990) and The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005). She is also co-editor of Oeconomies in the Age of Newton (2003), and the author of over 30 articles. Carl Wennerlind is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College. He is the author of numerous articles on David Hume’s political economy that have appeared in History of Political Economy, Hume Studies, and Journal of Political Economy. His most recent piece on Hume garnered best article awards from the History of Economics Society and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.

• 1. Introduction2. The Scottish Contexts for Hume’s Political-economic Thinking 3. The Emergence of Hume as a Political Economist: A Biographical Sketch 4.Hume and Superfluous Value (or the Problem with Epictetus’ Slippers) 5. Manners and Morals: David Hume on Civility, Commerce, and the Social Construction of Difference 6. Hume’s Framework for a Natural History of the Passions7. An Artificial Virtue and the Oil of Commerce: A Synthetic View of Hume’s Theory of Money 8. Temporal Dimensions in Hume’s Monetary Theory 9. Fiction or Counterfeit?: Hume’s Philosophical Politics of Money 10. David Hume and Canadian Paper Money 11. French 'New Politics' and the Dissemination of David Hume’s Political Discourses on the Continent, 1750–177012. Hume’s Political Discourses and the French Luxury Debate 13. Constitution and Economy in David Hume’s Enlightenment 14. The 'Rich Country–Poor Country' Debate Revisited

"It is an outstanding collection and should be widely read by historians of economics.The contributions are uniformly excellent in their scholarship, and the book as a whole is a worthy successor to Rotwein. All significant aspects of Hume’s thought, from his analytical contributions in the specie-flow mechanism and monetary theory to the larger political/philosophical issues thrown up by the development of commercial societies in Europe, receive careful treatment. Just as Adam Smith scholarship in recent years has seen a movement toward placing his economic thought into the context of his moral philosophy, there has been a similar move among Hume scholars, to which the editors of this volume have been important contributors."Jeffrey T. Young, St. Lawrence University, Journal of the History of Economic Thought