Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment

''Methinks I am like a man, who having narrowly escap''d shipwreck'', David Hume writes in A Treatise of Human Nature, ''has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe''. With these words, Hume begins a memorable depiction of the crisis of philosophy and his turn to moral and political philoso...