Book contents
- Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Association of Ideas in Hume’s Treatise
- Chapter 2 Methodizing Hume’s Metaphysics
- Chapter 3 Hume on Belief
- Chapter 4 “All the Logic I think Proper to Employ”
- Chapter 5 Imagining the Unseen
- Chapter 6 The Updating Problem for Hume’s Account of Belief in Personal Identity
- Chapter 7 Experimental Philosophy, Blind Submission, and Hume’s Other “Sceptical Principles”
- Chapter 8 How to Read Book 2 of the Treatise
- Chapter 9 Hume on Curiosity
- Chapter 10 Hume’s Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature
- Chapter 11 Some Vexations about Character in Hume’s Treatise
- Chapter 12 Hume on Promising and Self-Obligation
- Chapter 13 No Men Are Created Equal
- Chapter 14 The Eighteenth-Century British Reception of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Chapter 13 - No Men Are Created Equal
Rank, Passions, and Virtues in Hume’s Treatise
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2025
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Book contents
- Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Association of Ideas in Hume’s Treatise
- Chapter 2 Methodizing Hume’s Metaphysics
- Chapter 3 Hume on Belief
- Chapter 4 “All the Logic I think Proper to Employ”
- Chapter 5 Imagining the Unseen
- Chapter 6 The Updating Problem for Hume’s Account of Belief in Personal Identity
- Chapter 7 Experimental Philosophy, Blind Submission, and Hume’s Other “Sceptical Principles”
- Chapter 8 How to Read Book 2 of the Treatise
- Chapter 9 Hume on Curiosity
- Chapter 10 Hume’s Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature
- Chapter 11 Some Vexations about Character in Hume’s Treatise
- Chapter 12 Hume on Promising and Self-Obligation
- Chapter 13 No Men Are Created Equal
- Chapter 14 The Eighteenth-Century British Reception of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Summary
Contrary to stereotypes about enlightenment texts, the Treatise of Human Nature is thoroughly inegalitarian. This inegalitarianism is descriptive, not normative: Hume builds a tendency to create inequities into his theory of human nature, and he describes humans as continually and inevitably ranking one another and themselves as superior or inferior. I begin by showing the pervasiveness of inegalitarianism in Book 2’s theory of the passions—in the analysis of pride and the influence of property on pride, in the way that human commonality intensifies power imbalances, and in the influence of comparison on our sympathy with those judged superior or inferior. I then explain how Book 3’s analyses of natural abilities and justice reinforce the inegalitarianism of our passions. In other writings, Hume seems more aware of and concerned with questions of equality, but the Treatise offers few resources for criticizing the inequality that seems to result from our nature.
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- Hume's A Treatise of Human NatureA Critical Guide, pp. 224 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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