Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England

Description

Hume's Politics provides a comprehensive examination of David Hume's political theory, and is the first book to focus on Hume's monumental History of England as the key to his distinctly political ideas. Andrew Sabl argues that conventions of authority are the main building blocks of Humean politics, and explores how the History addresses political change and disequilibrium through a dynamic treatment of coordination problems. Dynamic coordination, as employed in Hume's work, explains how conventions of political authority arise, change, adapt to new social and economic conditions, improve or decay, and die. Sabl shows how Humean constitutional conservatism need not hinder--and may in fact facilitate--change and improvement in economic, social, and cultural life. He also identifies how Humean liberalism can offer a systematic alternative to neo-Kantian approaches to politics and liberal theory. At once scholarly and accessibly written, Hume's Politics builds bridges between political theory and political science. It treats issues of concern to both fields, including the prehistory of political coordination, the obstacles that must be overcome in order for citizens to see themselves as sharing common political interests, the close and counterintuitive relationship between governmental authority and civic allegiance, the strategic ethics of political crisis and constitutional change, and the ways in which the biases and injustices endemic to executive power can be corrected by legislative contestation and debate.

Andrew Sabl is professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of "Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics" (Princeton).

"Andrew Sabl has written an exceptionally fine overview of David Hume's History of England... The History into which Hume poured such brilliance remains an undiscovered continent... But with Sabl's full-length study, we can say that it has finally been mapped."--David Walsh, Perspectives on Politics "David Hume's History of England, a long-neglected classic of political philosophy, has recently become the object of serious study by political theorists. Hume's Politics, one of the best books on Hume published in recent years, shows convincingly how much political theorists and political scientists have to learn from Hume's masterpiece... Sabl shows that Hume's political theory is a more than worthy conversation partner with the political science of today. He thus points to a political science that is superior to both merely normative political theorizing and positivistic political science."--."--Thomas W. Merrill, Review of Politics "[E]xtraordinarily painstaking and erudite study of [Hume's History] in its six-volume entirety."--Political Theory