Introduction

This special issue originated in a workshop of June 2017 on ‘Hume’s Thought and Hume’s Circle’ at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in the University of Edinburgh. Among the participants was Nicholas Phillipson, whose death in January 2018 was an enormous loss to Hume studies and the intellectual history of eighteenth-century Scotland. The contributors to this special issue are greatly indebted to Phillipson’s scholarship, which was recently commemorated in this journal by a separate special issue.¹ Another participant in the workshop was M. A. Stewart, whose death in July 2021 dealt another blow to the scholarship of Hume’s life, thought, and reception. The recent publication of Stewart’s collected essays on Hume’s Philosophy in Historical Perspective (2022) is timed propitiously to coincide with this special issue, but it is a matter of great sadness to the contributors to have lost Stewart as a reader.²

As its title suggests, the purpose of this special issue is to explore the connection between Hume’s thought and his ‘circle’. The term ‘circle’ requires some elucidation. It can refer restrictedly to an interpersonal network. But it can also refer capaciously to a looser context of contemporary acquaintances, including one’s intellectual antagonists. This is the sense of ‘circle’ adopted in the articles collected below. Hume’s thought is often and cogently explicated by reference to a context which is not interpersonal. Hume’s relationship with Cartesianism or Berkeleianism, for example, in no way assumes his personal association with Descartes or Berkeley or a Cartesian or a Berkeleian. The connection is abstracted: it occurs either through direct contact with the works of those philosophers or the works of their interpreters, epitomists, and critics. Hume’s ‘context’ in this respect is the subject of considerable scholarship: it takes Hume’s professed familiarity with the work of those philosophers, or it surmises his familiarity with the work, and it builds an association between his propositions and theirs. Studying the relationship between Hume’s thought and his circle is different: it is concerned with the relationship between Hume’s propositions and the socio-intellectual context in which those propositions were created. This might direct our attention to the ‘atmospheric’ contact that Hume had with an individual’s ideas, perhaps in the context of a university lecture or in the colloquies of a salon or in a private conversation; it might take as its focus the contents of Hume’s or his associate’s correspondence; or it might ask about the relationship between the ideas expressed by Hume in his manuscripts and publications, and the ideas expressed by his acquaintances.

Importantly, ‘Hume’s thought and Hume’s circle’ implicates two foci: the effect of Hume’s circle on his thought and the effect of Hume’s thought on his circle. This is an approach to intellectual history more often practised than theorized, and a theorization lies beyond the scope of this Introduction. What bears re-emphasis, however, is that the task of reconstructing Hume’s intellectual context, and the task of reconstructing the relationship between Hume’s thought and his circle, are not incompatible or opposed. Indeed, the intention of this special issue is to illuminate how the tasks can be carried out in tandem.

Hume was at the centre of multiple contexts (Scottish, English, French) and in conjunctures nested within those contexts (the Moderate literati of Edinburgh, the Seymour Conway connection in London, the Lespinasse-d’Alembert salon and the coterie holbachique in Paris). Hume is present in the literature which attaches to each of these contexts, but the study of the context qua ‘Hume’s circle’ is rare. This tendency is arguably tied to the absence of scholarly tools necessary for its correction: an edition of Hume’s Correspondence, a critical edition of his published and manuscript writings, or a calendar of his activities au jour le jour. But perhaps the most significant barrier to its correction is the formidable legacy of Ernest Campbell Mossner’s Life of David Hume (1954, second edition 1980) and the ancillary publications which Mossner produced before his death in 1986. Mossner approached his task as a biographer during an era of prodigious biographical and editorial work on eighteenth-century Anglophone literati. W. S. Lewis’s edition of Walpole’s Correspondence and J. M. Osborn’s work on Boswell were characteristic of this twentieth-century vogue for editorial and biographical scholarship, particularly in the United States, and Lewis’s and Osborn’s immense manuscripts collections of Walpoleana and Boswelliana are permanent monuments to this basically defunct scholarly practice. That the collections are associated with Yale University, and the editions which Lewis and Osborn produced were issued by Yale University Press, speaks to the manner in which these enthusiasms were often linked to an institutional culture that survived only as long as its spiritus rector could superintend or subsidize it. In Mossner’s case, his co-authorship of an article on Hume’s History with Harry Ransom provides a sense of how Mossner’s interests were allowed to flourish where they might elsewhere have withered.³ Ransom was president of the University of Texas, Austin, where Mossner was employed, and the Harry Ransom Center has engaged in the programmatic collection of Humeana since its foundation in 1957. One might conjecture that two developments coincided: first, Mossner’s work discouraged others from venturing into the subject of Hume’s circle, in the belief that it had been treated sufficiently or exhaustively; second, Mossner’s work typified an approach which fell out of fashion by the later twentieth century, when the longueurs of editorial and biographical work were disfavoured by the academy in North America and Britain.

There were two signal exceptions. One was the editorial project co-ordinated by David Fate Norton, M. A. Stewart, and Thomas L. Beauchamp, now known as the Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. This project was initially proposed as an alternative to the standard editions of Hume’s ‘philosophical’ writings: Selby-Bigge, Kemp-Smith, Green and Grose. Norton, Stewart, and Beauchamp divided the volumes between themselves, and stressed the impetus for revising the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editorial legacy which had continued to shape the scholarship of Hume’s philosophy. The project is now entering its fifth decade. Another exception was the work of Stewart, Phillipson, Duncan Forbes, David Raynor, John P. Wright, Roger L. Emerson, and Richard Sher, which reshaped our understanding of the relationship between Hume’s circle and Hume’s thought.⁴ The articles in this special issue frequently reflect the influence of these scholars – and aim to extend it in new directions.

Raynor and Sher themselves contribute in this special issue to an ongoing debate about the authorship of Sister Peg, the pamphlet on the Scottish Militia, published anonymously in 1760. This is a debate coeval with the publication itself, when contemporaries speculated on the pamphlet’s authorship, and it was a debate which Raynor revived with his edition of the text in 1982 for Cambridge University Press. In the Introduction to his edition, Raynor proposed that the author of the pamphlet was Hume, where Sher and other scholars had contended that the author was Hume’s friend, Adam Ferguson. Raynor and Sher re-join this debate in the special issue with articles which defy summary here. The reader of the special issue must peruse the articles independently, in no way prepossessed by an editorial gloss. The contributions highlight the benefits which close study of Hume’s circle can confer. Raynor and Sher draw from an extraordinary range of primary printed and manuscript sources to build elaborate cases for their attributions. Hume’s role as author or spectator has fascinating implications for the study of his thought. As author, the attribution, if correct, reflects Hume’s political commitments in the 1760s, where these are often recovered only by emendations to his History or the fitful asides of his private correspondence. As spectator, the attribution, if correct, reflects Hume’s disinclination openly to engage in political debate, at a juncture when he was turning to the muted purdah of diplomatic service, while revealing the stratagems he practised to insulate an acquaintance, Ferguson, from the criticism which the latter might have hoped to evade by publishing anonymously. In either case, our understanding of the episode is enriched enormously; the contributions are essential to any future scholarship on the subject.

The contribution of Skjönsberg focuses on a subject which has long awaited systematic attention: Hume’s association with Edmund Burke. The pair belonged to different generations: Burke was nearly eighteen years younger than Hume. Yet their circles intersected, and they evidently had met. Skjönsberg chronicles the pair’s personal and intellectual encounters during their lifetimes. As Skjönsberg notes, ‘[r]eading Hume is likely to have improved Burke’s political acumen and benefited him throughout his life, even as he disagreed with core elements of Hume’s scepticism and held many contrasting political opinions’. According to Skjönsberg, Hume’s value to Burke lay in the 1750s and 1790–1791, but receded in the period between these years, when Hume was ‘hostile to Burke’s brand of Whiggism’. Burke reportedly believed that Hume had become a ‘literary coxcomb’ from his residency in France in the 1760s, when the flattery of the philosophes obliterated the ‘unaffected’ character which had impressed Burke in the 1750s. Skjönsberg shows that this personal disaffection did not inhibit Burke’s occasionally favourable engagement with Hume’s writings. Burke consorted with Hume’s ideas, using them as a whetstone for the refinement of his own judgements. In Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777), for example, he favourably cited Hume’s essay ‘Of Civil Liberty’ regarding the security of private property in non-arbitrary governments. In Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), Burke cited the second volume of Hume’s History, and took a ‘swipe at Hume’s lack of religion’. In Burke’s Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace (1812), he criticized Hume’s conceit, in ‘Whether the British Government Inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’, that an absolute monarchy would be the ‘easiest death’ for the British constitution, by pre-empting the civil wars and revolutions which would end invariably with absolute monarchy ‘in any case’. Burke forcefully denied that any ‘Euthanasia of the British Constitution’ could be countenanced. Skjönsberg stresses the importance of surveying how Burke’s abstracted interactions with Hume might have stemmed from disagreements about Hume’s socio-political associations. In Skjönsberg’s judgement, a socio-political impetus – Hume’s association with the Seymour Conway circle, when the latter were aligned politically with the court, and Burke’s association with the Rockingham Whigs, when the latter were committed proponents of fettering the royal prerogative – was partly responsible for Burke’s hostile posture to Hume’s political thought.

Charette’s contribution focuses on a similar tension in the afterlife of Hume’s political thought, specifically in Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ of 1752. As Charette observes, the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ ‘would later become a touchstone for a younger circle of Scottish theorists sympathetic to the French Revolution’. John Millar, James Mackintosh, and Dugald Stewart ‘each drew upon elements of Hume’s essay during the 1790s’, when the socio-political reforms legislated by the French Revolutionaries drew suspicion to supposedly imitative contemplations in Britain. In the hands of Millar, Mackintosh, and Stewart, ‘Hume’s “Idea” was at once a justification for ideal political “theory” and a “practicable” plan for representative reform’. Hume’s ‘adaptation’ of Harrington’s Oceana (1656) ‘invited theorists to combine a Scottish sociology of long-term changes in property relations with their more immediate demands to rebalance political power’. In Millar’s An Historical View of the English Government (1787/1803) and his anonymous Letters of Crito (1796), Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), and Stewart’s lectures at the University of Edinburgh, one finds the reverberations of Hume’s essay in the same context in which Skjönsberg had found Burke ruminating on ‘Whether the British Government Inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’. Yet the lessons drawn by Millar, Mackintosh, and Stewart differed plainly from Burke’s: as Charette writes, ‘Hume’s dispassionate comparison of British and French government would prove useful to Scottish writers who believed Europeans might have something to learn from revolutionary France’.

Hume was personally familiar with Millar, and familiar with the ‘republican’ tendencies Millar had exhibited prior to 1775, when Hume had recommended Millar as a tutor for his nephew. The variety in political complexion of Hume’s friendships, including with professed Jacobites, as Skjönsberg has recently noted elsewhere,⁵ was partly responsible for the image of Hume as ‘le bon David’,⁶ whose genial social posture earned him the friendship of individuals occupying fundamentally opposed ends of a political and religious spectrum. The degree to which this tendency reflected the imperatives of ‘politeness’, in which divergent religio-political views would not inhibit social commerce, is an important consideration when asking about the constituents of Hume’s ‘circle’. As Skjönsberg records, Burke is ‘alleged to have told James Boswell that keeping company with Hume was “hardly defensible”, and that he only spoke to him since “the present state of society” required it’. Burke and John Millar were members of Hume’s ‘circle’ in the extended sense of ‘circle’ intended by this special issue, but the degree to which one can infer a political commitment from the tendency of social association requires careful handling. Hume’s approval of Millar as a tutor for his nephew was based on a familiarity with Millar’s political thought, and not mere familiarity with Millar socially: Hume had evidently known Millar since c. 1758 and he had discussed Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771) before February 1771.⁷

The rules governing socio-intellectual association in Hume’s lifetime are illuminated by the contribution of Mills, which focuses on Hume’s bête noire, William Warburton. Warburton is not an obvious candidate for membership of Hume’s ‘circle’, except by the incidental conjunction of the pair’s acquaintances. Quite remarkably, Andrew Millar, Hume’s publisher, was also Warburton’s publisher. As Adam Budd has recently noted, Warburton’s relationship with Millar was ‘peculiar’ precisely because of Warburton’s ‘implacable hatred of […] Hume’.⁸ Mills focuses on the ontology of the ‘Warburtonians’: the ‘confederacy’ of authors whom Hume believed were engaged in a campaign to libel his philosophy, but which ‘d[id] not seem to exist’. As Mills reveals, ‘there [was] no unified group of writers, numbering more than two, concerned with attacking Hume. Indeed, the authors we can identify plausibly as “Warburtonians” had varied, disparate and often positive responses to Hume’s writings’. Mills cogently argues that the invention of the ‘Warburtonians’ helps us to appreciate Hume’s ‘personal sense of what his project of encouraging philosophical conversation was up against’. Warburton’s criticism of Hume, like James Beattie’s, illustrated the limitations of the ‘politeness’ that Burke had grudgingly respected. Like Burke, Hume’s acquaintances faced a dilemma when they were inclined publicly to criticize his thought, while bound by the rules of politeness to abstain from public criticism. Warburton evidently believed that politeness could not preclude criticism, if the ideas criticized were a dissolvent of the foundations of politeness itself. As Mills observes, ‘if we follow James Harris’ line that Hume was trying to encourage his readers to join him in the project of enlightenment – of getting educated readers to join his dispassionate, civil philosophical conversation – then Warburton was the most prominent mid-eighteenth-century enemy of that enlightened project’. Yet as Mills reminds us, Warburton’s animus stemmed from the conceit that Hume’s project was destructive of the civility it ostensibly sought to nurture. Mills shows that Hume’s grievances towards the ‘Warburtonians’ were motivated by a sense of what belonging to a ‘circle’ demanded, and the conjoined sense that Warburton and his followers had spurned that demand by their resort to ‘polemical divinity’.

Susato’s contribution provides a further insight into Hume’s judgement of the controls of politeness and social association. Hume’s conflict with Rousseau in 1766 exercised him precisely because it placed the pair outside the boundaries of civilized disagreement. One of the remarkable features of their ‘dispute’ was the appeal which Hume made to sources of judgement external to his ‘circle’ tout court: the publication of A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau (1766) in English and in French translation, and the transcription of a preliminary manuscript, which Hume presented to George III, presumably via the Seymour Conways.⁹ Hume was undoubtedly concerned by the judgement of his ‘circle’ – letters to his social acquaintances in 1766 abound, in justification of his conduct with respect to Rousseau. But the pièces justificatives were offered to judges outside this circle, arguably in violation of the demand which he had made of the Warburtonians. Yet Rousseau was a special case, since he was, in Hume’s judgement, mentally incapable of obeying the controls that the Waburtonians had knowingly spurned. An appeal to the judgement of the public, and the King, was necessary to counteract the misinformation sown by Rousseau within the circle he shared with Hume. As Susato shows, Walpole’s role in the affaire – his forged letter assuming the identity of Frederick the Great of Prussia – offended Hume’s preference for ‘dispassionate, civil philosophical conversation’ by using the blanket of anonymity to mislead the interlocutors in what ought to have been an equable search for clarity. Walpole recognized that a conversation that occurred publicly was distinguishable from a conversation that occurred within the context of one’s circle: the former was exposed to the manipulations he practised, in part because it dangerously reposed faith in the judgement of a public corrupted by modish ‘philosophy’ and unfiltered for their aptitude as ‘polite’ conversationalists. As Susato notes, Walpole execrated Hume’s ‘literary friends’ in Paris, to whom he was ‘perfectly indifferent’. Walpole evidently believed that the ‘silly altercations’ of ‘men of letters’ – which they ‘affect to condemn’ – were contrived only to foster the participants’ celebrity. As he wrote in a letter to the Duchess d’Aiguillon: ‘It spreads their names, and they are often known by their disputes, when they cannot make themselves talked of for their talents’. Susato observes that Walpole’s inclination mirrored Hume’s ‘self-professed’ aversion to ‘literary squabbles’ in My Own Life. The latter is the clearest instantiation of his commitment to ‘dispassionate, civil philosophical conversation’. Yet Susato argues that Hume exhibited the same ‘sensitive vanity’ which Walter Scott would later associate with Walpole: defending an ostensible abstention from controversy while engaging in it himself, out of sensitivity to his reputation.

Stuart-Buttle’s contribution reminds us of the contrariety between this commitment and Hume’s view of controversy. As Hume noted in My Own Life, he had first discerned the ‘symptoms of a rising reputation’ during his residency at Ninewells between April 1749 and July 1751. Stuart-Buttle observes that Hume’s description of these ‘symptoms’ is ‘revealing’: ‘Answers by Reverends, and Right Reverends, came out two or three in a year; and I found, by Dr. Warburton’s railing, that the books were beginning to be esteemed in good company’. Stuart-Buttle argues that this phrase ‘substantiates the claim that Hume was, at mid-century, overwhelmingly concerned to secure literary fame in England, and that he recognised the “railing” of clerical critics such as Warburton to be the surest indicator of success’. Yet the desired constituency of Hume’s admirers is unclarified by Hume. Stuart-Buttle notes of Hume’s decision to include excised parts of the Treatise as Essays X and XI in the Philosophical Essays (1748) could be interpreted in two ‘potentially contradictory ways, which reflect a privileging of two different contexts’: first, a ‘primarily Scottish’ context, in which Hume 'refused to compromise his philosophy out of a concern for the sensitivities (or prejudices) of Hutcheson et al.’; and second, an ‘English context’, in which ‘moral philosophy and theology were held to be inseparable’, and in which Hume revised his mistake of ‘castrating’ the Treatise, which had only allowed ‘English critics’ to ignore his magnum opus ‘on the basis that it did not intervene directly in the theological debates which they considered to be of greatest philosophical interest’. In both instances, Hume’s intended readership was not admiring but agonistic. The predictable effect was to generate the ‘squabbles’ that Hume later professed to dislike. Stuart-Buttle convincingly challenges ‘the prevailing presupposition that a now-obscure Anglican clergyman like [Conyers] Middleton could not possibly have engaged Hume’s attention, and informed both the “manner” and “matter” of some of his most famous writings’. In Stuart-Buttle’s judgement, My Own Life ‘reveals clearly enough’ that Hume ‘grasped the need to present his philosophy in a way that spoke to his intended audience – and, from mid-century, the audience with which Hume appears to have been primarily concerned was English’. As Hume recognized, the ‘distinctive’ intellectual culture of England had as its ‘characteristic feature’ an ‘insatiable appetite for theological controversy’. In this regard, Hume’s thought in the Ninewells years was shaped by a sense of the ‘circle’ in which he sought it to be received. Conyers Middleton’s works – ‘plural’, as Stuart-Buttle reveals, by ingeniously parsing Montesquieu’s phrase in his July-September 1749 letter to Hume (‘les ouvrages dont vous me parlez’) – were Hume’s guide in this activity, in which he rather ironically settled on a similar solution to Middleton’s in redressing the effects of ‘false religion’, namely ‘a rigorously Erastian settlement in church and state, which placed an ecclesiastical establishment of salaried clergy under the vigilant superintendence of the civil magistrate’.

This survey of the contributions to the special issue is by no means exhaustive. The contributors’ claims range widely and remind us of the further potential in taking Hume’s ‘circle’ as the object of our inquiry. Hume’s connections with the Seymour Conways, the Elliots of Minto, and the Mures of Caldwell, where considerable manuscript evidence for their interactions is extant, cry out for studies to accompany those which have already enriched our understanding of his circle – on his friendship with Adam Smith in the recent work of Dennis C. Rasmussen,¹⁰ or on his connection with James St. Clair in the recent work of Emilio Mazza.¹¹ There remains the difficulty of whether using Hume as a lens to understand his ‘circle’ in the capacious sense used by this special issue is distortive. In a related context, Giambattista Vico’s Naples, a recurrent difficulty is whether Vico’s writings should be used to interpret a culture whose intellectual preoccupations he did not share, but rejected.¹² The comparison is not idle: Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Duncan Forbes, and John Robertson have recognized the benefit of studying Hume and Vico, in conjunction, as authors whose relationship to their context is comparably revealing.¹³ With these authors, one can argue that Hume’s thought – like Vico’s – revealed the intellectual preoccupations of its surrounding culture by forcing orthodoxy to articulate itself. The study of Hume’s ‘circle’ is not a narrow exercise; it is a key to the historiography of eighteenth-century history Britain, if not Francophone Europe. Nicholas Phillipson and M. A. Stewart understood this point, and explicated it in studies of admirable lucidity and scholarly judgement. This special issue is dedicated to their memory.

Acknowledgements

My special thanks are owed to the contributors Danielle Charette, Robin Mills, David Raynor, Richard Sher, Max Skjönsberg, Tim Stuart-Buttle, and Ryu Susato. The special issue originated in a conference supported by the Susan Manning Fund at IASH during my tenure as the David Hume Fellow. I am grateful to IASH for its support of my research. My thanks are also owed to Richard Whatmore for expertly shepherding this special issue to publication.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Nicholas Phillipson and the Sciences of Humankind in Enlightenment Scotland, ed. Thomas Ahnert (=History of European Ideas, 48 (2022)). The article included in the special issue by Danielle Charette, ‘Hume’s “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” and Scottish Political Thought of the 1790s’, History of European Ideas 48 (2022): 78–96 was initially commissioned for this special issue, as its Acknowledgement section indicates, and it is treated as a component part of the special issue for the purposes of this Introduction. The article was included within the Phillipson special issue owing to an administrative error committed by the publisher, Taylor and Francis.

2 For a recent collection of Stewart’s contributions on Hume tout court see M. A. Stewart, Hume’s Philosophy in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2022).

3 Ernest Campbell Mossner and Harry Ransom, ‘Hume and the Conspiracy of the Booksellers’, The University of Texas Studies in English 29 (1950): 162–82.

4 For examples of these publications see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975); Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, 1985); David Raynor, ‘Hume and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 231–50; Hume and Hume’s Connexions, ed. M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright (University Park, 1995); Roger L. Emerson, Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2009).

5 Max Skjönsberg, ‘David Hume and the Jacobites’, Scottish Historical Review 100 (2021): 25–56.

6 For the classic study of this image see Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Forgotten Hume: Le Bon David (New York, 1943).

7 Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Felix Waldmann (Edinburgh, 2014), 90.

8 Adam Budd, Circulating Enlightenment: The Career and Correspondence of Andrew Millar, 1725–68 (Oxford, 2020), cxxix.

9 Further Letters of David Hume, ed. Waldmann, p. 184.

10 Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton, 2017).

11 Emilio Mazza and Edoardo Piccoli, ‘Disguised in Scarlet: Hume and Turin in 1748’, I Castelli di Yale 11 (2011): 71–108; Emilio Mazza, Gazze, Whist e verità: David Hume e le immagini della filosofia (Milan, 2021).

12 For an example of this tendency see Harold Samuel Stone, Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 1685–1750 (Leiden, 1997).

13 Giuseppe Giarrizzo, David Hume politico e storico (Turin, 1962); Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Vico, la politica e la storia (Naples, 1981); Duncan Forbes, ‘Politics and History in David Hume’, Historical Journal 6 (1963): 280–323; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2005).