Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

The objective of this Critical Guide is to provide a series of in-depth studies on the Essays of David Hume, as well as an account of the state of scholarship. In Hume’s lifetime, the Essays acquired considerable éclat throughout Europe and North America; they influenced the writings of such diverse figures as James Madison and William Paley, and they have since become a staple of undergraduate and graduate curricula in history, politics, and philosophy. Yet the Essays have received comparatively modest attention in the scholarship of Hume’s life and thought. The early tradition of Hume’s intellectual biography, pioneered by J. Y. T. Greig and Ernest Campbell Mossner, subordinated the Essays to Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries as monuments of Hume’s contribution to the history of philosophy. This tendency diminished in the 1970s and 1980s, when Duncan Forbes, J. G. A. Pocock and Istvan Hont placed the Essays at the heart of their studies of Hume’s political thought and political economy. The significance of the Essays in James Harris’s Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015) bears witness to the importance that the work has since acquired in general reconstructions of Hume’s intellectual commitments. However, there is no ‘critical guide’ to Hume’s Essays in any language, with recent studies having focused more restrictively on Hume’s political economy. This book is intended to address this absence by providing scholars and students with a wide-ranging and accessible overview of the Essays. The recent publication of the Clarendon Edition of Hume’s Essays (E (C)) is timed propitiously. The extraordinary editorial work of Professor Beauchamp and Professor Box has provided an unparalleled resource for the interpretation of the Essays, with a rich apparatus and a granular account of the complex history of the work’s publication. This Critical Guide has benefitted enormously from their labours.