Hume noticed that the early modern era had given rise to a new kind of party quite unlike the interest-based factions and personal retinues of earlier ages, one motivated – dangerously so – by ‘abstract speculative principle’. Hume lacked our word ‘ideology’, but this is the phenomenon he had detected. Ideological parties were animated by something akin to religious fervour, ‘erected’, as Womersley notes, ‘into something like confessions’, while ‘dogmas’ supplanted the necessarily ‘limited working hypotheses’ of conventional political practice.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/colin-kidd/antidote-to-glibness
Hume racist donchaknow
Hume worried that the scale of Britain’s public debt might bring about the state’s collapse, though the crisis he foresaw eventually occurred not in Britain, but across the Channel just before the French Revolution?
It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: ‘Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.’
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