David Hume, Polite Polemicist

David Hume, one of the great philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, died exactly 250 years ago, in the momentous year of 1776. In his own day, he became rich and famous as a best-selling historian, but it is in his essays that he made some of his most accessible and most profound statements on politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. These essays are collected in a new, exquisite edition by Penguin and edited by leading literary scholar David Womersley, best known as the modern editor of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

Complete Essays contains not only the pieces that appeared in the 18th century but also unpublished essays from Hume’s youth and old age, as well as essays published posthumously and those he withdrew from his original collections. It also includes Hume’s brief and brilliant autobiography, My Own Life, in which Hume describes how he turned to essays after A Treatise of Human Nature, which today is considered his masterpiece, “fell dead-born from the press.” As Womersley notes in his introduction to the two-volume work, Hume was not a professional academic but what we might call a public intellectual. He had evidently overestimated the reading public when he expected his technically difficult Treatise to sell well. Essay-writing was his attempt “to find and influence a larger readership by mastering a more accessible mode of writing.”

About the Author

Max Skjönsberg

Max Skjönsberg is an associate professor of humanities at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida.

David Hume, one of the great philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, died exactly 250 years ago, in the momentous year of 1776. In his own day, he became rich and famous as a best-selling historian, but it is in his essays that he made some of his most accessible and most profound statements on politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. These essays are collected in a new, exquisite edition by Penguin and edited by leading literary scholar David Womersley, best known as the modern editor of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

Complete Essays contains not only the pieces that appeared in the 18th century but also unpublished essays from Hume’s youth and old age, as well as essays published posthumously and those he withdrew from his original collections. It also includes Hume’s brief and brilliant autobiography, My Own Life, in which Hume describes how he turned to essays after A Treatise of Human Nature, which today is considered his masterpiece, “fell dead-born from the press.” As Womersley notes in his introduction to the two-volume work, Hume was not a professional academic but what we might call a public intellectual. He had evidently overestimated the reading public when he expected his technically difficult Treatise to sell well. Essay-writing was his attempt “to find and influence a larger readership by mastering a more accessible mode of writing.”