Hume's ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ and Scottish political thought of the 1790s

ABSTRACT

This article traces the reception of Hume's ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752) among a circle of Scottish Whigs supportive of the French Revolution. While the influence of Hume's essay on American Federalists like James Madison has long been a subject of debate, historians have overlooked the appeal that the plan held for Hume's intellectual heirs in Scotland. In the early 1790s, theorists such as John Millar, James Mackintosh, and Dugald Stewart believed European governments – above all France – could progress in the direction of the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. Hume modelled his plan after The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) by James Harrington. In so doing, he helped transmit a version of institutional republicanism to a generation of Scottish intellectuals searching for more explicit political reforms. Thinkers like Millar and Stewart interpreted Hume's essay as both a justification for idealist political ‘speculation’ and a ‘practicable’ plan for rebalancing political power in a large commercial state.

KEYWORDS:

• David Hume
• James Harrington
• John Millar
• James Mackintosh
• Dugald Stewart

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Felix Waldmann for inviting me to contribute to this special issue on ‘Hume's thought and Hume's circle’ and for his feedback on a previous draft. Max Skjönsberg also provided helpful comments, and Anna Plassart kindly arranged to digitize her microfilm of the Millar lectures for me at the height of the pandemic. Audiences at the IHR History of Political Ideas Early Career Seminar and the UChicago Political Theory Workshop were encouraging at the early phase of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War of the Thirteen Colonies ([1959] Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), xiii, 5–6; James Moore, ‘Hume's Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 10, no. 4 (1977): 810.

2 Robbins conceded that this essay did ‘seem to place him [Hume] near to the Commonwealthmen’, 212. Moore also makes allowances for ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in ‘Hume's Political Science’, 833–39. The most thorough treatment of the essay's relation with British civic-republicanism is by John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of the Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 137–78.

3 David Hume, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994), 514.

4 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1856), 84. For the political atmosphere in 1790s Scotland, see Bob Harris, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) and Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. Bob Harris (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005).

5 The definitive overview of controversies concerning Hume's influence on James Madison and the American Federalists is Mark Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), chap. 6; Ryu Susato, ‘Hume as an Ami de la Liberté: The Reception of his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”’, Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 3 (2016): 569–96.

6 Anna Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. chap 2. For the suggestion that Hume's intellectual conservatism bolstered Scottish loyalism, see T. M. Devine, ‘The Failure of Radical Reform in Scotland in the late Eighteenth Century: The Social and Economic Context’, in Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 56–7; and Harris, The Scottish People and the French Revolution, 27.

7 Hume, ‘Idea’, 527.

8 John Millar to Edmund Burke, 16 August 1784, ‘The letters of John Millar’, ed. John W. Cairns, History of European Ideas 45, no. 2 (2019): 237–303, at 272.

9 John Craig, Account of the Life and Writings of John Millar, Esq. [1806], reprinted in Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 11. William Christian Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 16–18.

10 James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae: Defense of the Revolution: A Critical Edition, ed. Edmund Garratt (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 97n217.

11 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’ (originally titled ‘Of Liberty and Despotism), Essays, 92–5.

12 On Hume's rejection of the Britain-France dichotomy and other tenants of ‘vulgar Whiggism’, see Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. chap. 5.

13 Judith Shklar, ‘Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington’, American Political Science Review 53, no. 3 (1959), 664; James Conniff, ‘Hume's Political Methodology: A Reconsideration of “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’”, Review of Politics 38, no. 1 (1976), 101; idem, ‘The Enlightenment and American Political Thought: A Study of the Origins of Madison's Federalist Number 10’, Political Theory 8, no. 3 (1980), 382.

14 Ryu Susato, Hume's Skeptical Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 194–200; Richard Bourke, ‘Theory and Practice: the revolution in political judgement’, in Political Judgment: Essays for John Dunn, eds. Bourke and Raymond Geuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 101; Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 92–3. See Hume, ‘Idea’, 512–13; 647, variant a. Hume dropped this paragraph in 1770. It is not clear why.

15 Hume, ‘Idea,’ 514.

16 Hume to President de Montesquieu, 10 April 1741, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932): 1:133–38; Hume to Robert Wallace, 29 September, 1751, in New Letters of David Hume, eds. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983), 30.

17 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 11, chap. 6, p. 166.

18 Hume, ‘Idea’, 515.

19 Ibid. Compare with Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book 27, pp. 521–23, 525.

20 Hume, ‘Idea’, 515, 522–23. Cf. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 172–74.

21 Hume, ‘Idea’, 516–17.

22 Ibid., 525–26; Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book 9, chap. 3, pp. 131–37.

23 Hume to David Hume the Younger, 8 December, 1775, Letters. ed. Grieg, 2:306.

24 Ibid., 2:306–7.

25 E.g. David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 158; Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 42–3; John Hill Burton, The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1846), 402, 479–80; John Robertson, ‘Universal monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume's critique of an English Whig doctrine’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 371–72, 372n68. Robertson suggests that the older Hume was later persuaded by Montesquieu's comparative view of constitutions and thus came to see his own ‘Harringtonian approach to politics’ as ‘archaic’. On my reading, the Harringtonian approach that Hume (re)modeled in 1752 was itself inspired by his reading of Montesquieu.

26 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, MSS Gen. 289, f. 117, University of Glasgow.

27 Ibid., MSS Gen. 290, f. 36. The lecture is dated 1788, but Millar's discussion of the Constitution of 1791 means this cannot be correct.

28 Millar, Letters of Crito, on the Causes, Objects, and Consequences of the Present War [1796], ed. Anna Plassart, History of European Ideas 45, no. 2 (2019): pp. 148–90, at letter ii, pp. 153–54.

29 Ibid., letter II, p. 153.

30 An Account of the Trial of Thomas Muir of Huntershill Esq. younger, of Huntershill before the High Court of Judiciary ..., ed. James Robertson (Edinburgh, 1793), 105, 119.

31 Ibid., 109–110.

32 On their connection, see Ronnie Young, ‘Thomas Muir at Glasgow: John Millar and the University’, in Thomas Muir of Huntershill: Essays for the Twenty First Century, eds. Gerard Carruthers and Don Martin (Humming Earth: Edinburgh, 2016), 112–136. Millar's eldest son, John Craig Millar, was a close associate of Muir in various Scottish Friends of the People organizations before he fled to Pennsylvania in 1795. See Jane Rendall, ‘Prospects of the American Republic: 1795–1821: The Radical and Utopian Politics of Robina Millar and Frances Wright’, in Enlightenment and Emancipation, eds. Susan Manning and Peter France (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 149–50.

33 Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 68.

34 Craig, Life of Millar, 56. See Proceedings of the Society of Friends of the People … ([London], 1792), 4. Lord Maitland (later Lord Lauderdale) lived with Hume's nephew in 1777 when the two were both boarding with Millar. David Murray, Memories of the Old College of Glasgow: Some Chapters in the History of the University (Glasgow: Jackson, Wiley, and Co, 1927), 397.

35 Craig, Life of Millar, 70; John D. Brims, ‘The Scottish Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution’, (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1983), 87–8.

36 Millar to Samuel Rose, 16 February, 1790, in 'The letters of John Millar', ed. Cairns, 285–86.

37 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, MSS Gen. 290, f. 34, f. 36. Compare with MSS Gen. 289, f. 117; Letters of Crito, letter ii, pp. 153–54.

38 Hume, Letters, 2:305–7. Francis Jeffrey later recounted that ‘Mr. Millar was a decided whig, and did not perhaps bear any antipathy to the name of a republican’. Edinburgh Review, 3 (1803), 158. Jeffrey attended the University of Glasgow in the late 1780s, though his Tory father forbid him from studying with Millar.

39 Michael Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, in Wealth and Virtue, 327.

40 Ibid., 328–29. Ignatieff here departs from Duncan Forbes’ classic piece, ‘Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, The Cambridge Journal 7, no. 1 (1953), 643–70.

41 Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 166–69, 179–80.

42 Craig, Life of Millar, 78. Acting as one of Millar's literary executors, Craig helped publish the third and fourth volumes in 1803.

43 Millar, An Historical View of English Government [1787/1803], eds. Mark Salber Philips and Dale R. Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 587.

44 Ibid., 587–88.

45 Ibid., 588; compare with Hume, ‘Idea,’ 525.

46 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, MSS Gen. 290, f. 40.

47 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, 1771–72, MS 99, f. 61, The Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

48 Millar, An Historical View of English Government, 72.

49 Ibid., 11.

50 Ibid., 725–26.

51 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, MSS Gen. 290, f. 38, University of Glasgow.

52 Millar, An Historical View, 703.

53 Craig, Life of Millar, 63–4.

54 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’ [1787–88], MSS Gen. 291, f. 18; Ignatieff, ‘Millar and Individualism’, 329.

55 Craig, Life of Millar, 65; Hume, ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic’, Essays, 51–3.

56 Hume, ‘Whether the British Government’, 47–53. Hume's memorable (but ambiguous) description of the slow death of the British Constitution was later cited by both ‘Country’ critics of royal patronage and apologists for the Court. See Moore, ‘Hume's Political Science’, 823–24. Duncan Forbes noticed that The Craftsman reprinted Hume's essay in October 1741. Hume's Philosophical Politics, 211.

57 On the Scots Chronicle as a voice for Scotland's Foxite Whigs, see Harris, The Scottish People and the Revolution, 68–70; Emma Vincent Macleod, ‘The Scottish Opposition Whigs and the Revolution’, in Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. Harris, 87–89; Plassart, ‘Introduction: Millar and his Circle’, History of European Ideas 45, no. 2 (2019): 134–36.

58 Millar seems to have collaborated with Lauderdale in September 1793 on a petition to the King from the City of Glasgow to ‘end the present war’. See Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 74.

59 Letters of Crito, letter vii, 163–64.

60 Letters of Crito, letter iii, pp. 154–55. On Crito's deployment of Foxite Whig arguments, see Plassart, Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution, 83–85. The letters are dedicated to Charles James Fox.

61 Ibid., letter v, pp. 158–59.

62 Ibid., letter ii, pp. 153–54.

63 Ibid., letter vii, p. 163; letter xv, p. 188.

64 Ibid., letter ii, p. 154.

65 Letters of Crito, letter xv, pp. 188–89.

66 Plassart, ‘Introduction: Millar and his Circle’, 138.

67 James Burgh, Crito, or Essays on various subjects, 2 vols. (London, 1766–67). In Burgh's words, ‘Crito is an independent Briton, a citizen, and friend, of that country, which a sett of worthy gentlemen have long been plundering and corrupting … ’ 2:190.

68 Ibid., 2:38. Cited in Susato, ‘Hume as an Ami de la Liberté’, 596.

69 Letters of Crito, letter ii, p. 153.

70 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976; rpt. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), VI.ii.2.16, p. 233. See also VI.ii.2.18, p. 234. The editors refer to the maxim from Crito (which Smith quotes by way of Cicero) in notes 7 and 9.

71 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.11.2 11–18, pp. 231–34. For a good elucidation of this passage, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 377–88.

72 Millar, Letters of Crito, letter xii, pp. 177–79.

73 For attribution to Craig, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 155–56n7; and Plassart, ‘Millar and his Circle’, 136–38.

74 Letters of Sidney, on Inequality of Property, ed. Anna Plassart, History of European Ideas 45, no. 2 (2019): 191–231, at 191. Compare with Harrington, Oceana, 237–38; cf. Hume, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, 515.

75 Letters of Sidney, letter v, p. 199.

76 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, 92–3; Letters of Sidney, letter v, p. 199. Craig repeats this observation about Hume and ‘prejudices against the useful professions’ in the Elements of Political Science, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814), 2:204; see also 1:177-78, note.

77 Letters of Sidney, especially letter 12, pp. 212–13. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, Vol. 1. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; rpt. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), III.ii. 2–4, pp. 382–84, III.iv.19, pp. 422–23 On the theory of property in Sidney, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 169–73. Plassart notes that Millar, Mackintosh, and Stewart all made similar calls to abolish primogeniture, in ‘Introduction: Millar and his Circle’, 144.

78 Garratt, ‘Editor's Introduction’ to Vindiciae Gallicae, xvi, xviii; Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, vol. 1, ed. Robert James Mackintosh (London, 1835), 58, 79.

79 Memoirs of Mackintosh, 79. When Mackintosh's second daughter was born in June 1792, he named her Maitland, in Lauderdale's honour. Christopher J. Finlay, ‘Mackintosh, Sir James, of Kyllachy (1765–1832)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; online ed.

80 Jane Rendall, ‘The Political Ideas and Activities of James Mackintosh’ (PhD diss., London University, 1972), 42–8; Garratt, ‘Editor's Introduction’, xviii-xx; Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution, 87–9; Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 266, 268–71.

81 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 145–46.

82 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1965), esp. 572–78.

83 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 143.

84 Ibid., 38–40.

85 Ibid., 62–3; Cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. A. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 197.

86 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 66–67.

87 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (originally titled ‘Of Luxury’), in Essays, 278.

88 Ibid., 277; 631, variant d.

89 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 95.

90 Ibid., 114. As Susato notes, English radicals such as Richard Price and Benjamin Flower also likened the French National Assembly to Hume's commonwealth. ‘Hume as an Ami de la Liberté’, 585–86.

91 Craig, Elements of Political Science, 1: 206, note.

92 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 123.

93 On Mackintosh's eclectic mix of sources, see Lionel A. McKenzie, ‘The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform: James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae’, Eighteenth Century Studies 14, no. 3 (1981): 264–82; Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 265–77.

94 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 28. My emphasis. On this use of Hume, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 268–70.

95 Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Essays, 112–13.

96 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 30. My emphasis.

97 See Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 268–70.

98 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 169.

99 Hume, ‘Idea’, 528. Cf. Harrington, Oceana, 321. For a similar reply to Harrington and the ‘death’ of a regime, see Hume, ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic,’ [1741] Essays, 51–52.

100 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 169–70.

101 Ibid., 165–66.

102 Ibid. 166.

103 Hume, ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’, 47–8.

104 Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 168–70.

105 [Mackintosh], ‘Review of Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of a Catechism … ,’ Edinburgh Review 31 no. 61 (1818): 165–203.

106 On Mackintosh as a spokesman for ‘the variety-of-suffrages school’ of representation, see Gregory Conti, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation: Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 18–24, 32–34.

107 Mackintosh, ‘Review of Plan of Parliamentary Reform’, 190–91.

108 Hume, ‘Idea’, 516. On Hume's revisions to the franchise see John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 284–86.

109 Mackintosh, ‘Review of Plan’, 167–68, 181. Though Hume was otherwise disparaging of Cromwell's Instrument of Government (1653), he praised its standardized procedure for parliamentary elections. The History of England [1756], ed. William B. Todd, vol. 6 (Indianapolis, IN, 1983), 69.

110 ‘Review of Plan’, 191.

111 On Stewart as a pedagogue, see Donald Winch, ‘The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils’, in That Noble Science of Politics by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 25–61. For situating Stewart's philosophy, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, chap. 7.

112 See Stewart's letters to Rev. Archibald Alison, reprinted in John Veitch's ‘Memoir of Dugald Stewart’ [1857], in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 11 vols., ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: T. Constable and Co., 1854–1860), 10: cxxii–cxxxvi. Michael Brown suggests Stewart continued to be more ‘subversive’ in his lectures than in print. ‘Dugald Stewart and the Problem of Teaching Politics in the 1790s’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 1 (2007): 87–126.

113 Cockburn, Memorials, 18, 85.

114 Ibid., 82.

115 Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, in Collected Works, 2: 228–29.

116 Ibid., 2:238; Haakonssen, Natural Law, 241–43.

117 Stewart, Elements, 2:242–44; 2:250–51.

118 Ibid., 2:249–51. Compare with Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 28.

119 Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, 112–13; Stewart, Elements, 2:220–23; 230–36. On Stewart's teleology, see Haakonssen, Natural Law, 243–45; Winch, ‘Dugald Stewart’, 33–5, 39–43.

120 Stewart, Elements, 2:233–34.

121 Ibid., 2:233–34.

122 Ibid. 2: 222–23, 2:231–40.

123 Lord William Craig to Stewart, 15 February, 1794, reprinted in Collected Works, 10:lxxi-lxxii.

124 Stewart, Elements, 2:219n.

125 Stewart to Craig, 20 February, 1794, in Collected Works, 10:lxxiii.

126 Ibid., 10: lxxiii-lxxiv. Stewart again directed readers to his Account of Smith when he reprinted the controversial section ‘Use and Abuse of General Principles in Politics’ in 1802. See Elements, 2:219n.

127 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 57.

128 Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D, in Collected Works, 10:62.

129 Ibid., 10:63. Stewart wrote to Millar, Smith's former pupil at Glasgow, for first-hand biographical material for his Account. Millar to Stewart, [c. December 1790], ‘The letters of John Millar’, 289–90. Millar surely read Stewart's Account, which includes an extended quotation from his letter (Account, 10:10–14). This may explain why Millar took up the mantle of ‘Crito’ in 1796.

130 Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, 10:65. Stewart refers readers his earlier Elements, 2:240.

131 Stewart, ‘Lectures on Political Economy’ in Collected Works, 9:373; see also 9:356–57.

132 Ibid., 9:356, 9:374.

133 Ibid., 9:374–5.

134 Ibid., 9:365.

135 Ibid., 9:365.

136 Ibid., 9:375–76.

137 Ibid., 8:21.

138 Ibid., 8:9–11, 8:24.

139 Ibid., 8:19, 8:23.

140 Ibid., 9:376.

141 Ibid., 9:400.

142 Harrington, Oceana, 161–62, 170–71; cf. Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, 94.

143 Stewart, ‘Lectures on Political Economy’, 9:400–1; also 9:375–76.

144 Hume, ‘Idea,’ 513.