If Hume was so useful to Madison, why did Madison not refer to Hume directly in Federalist No. 10? Even scholars who have heard the Humean ring to Madison's Federalist No. 10 conjecture that Madison did not refer to Hume because Hume's was a dangerous name to invoke publicly. To show affiliation with Hume in early America, it is supposed, was an obvious liability. That supposition fits nicely with the commonly held, but erroneous, view which it helps to propagate, that Hume's works and thought were generally rejected in eighteenth-century America. It does not stand up so well against the accumulating evidence and revisionist findings of the present study. While the question of the motives behind Madison's silent use of Hume does not lend itself to a definitive solution, thinking about better answers impels us to describe Hume's American reception in greater detail and wider context. It is there that Madison's silent use of Hume is explained, although not in the way that modern scholars falsely have presumed to explain it.

A NEGATIVE PORTRAYAL OF HUME IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

Curiously, the perfunctory thesis that Hume's reception in late eighteenth-century America was a mostly negative one, though it is ultimately flawed, has a much stronger case than its proponents put forward. Some of the negative aspects of Hume's colonial reputation continued to cast partial shadows on Hume in the early American Republic.