# David Hume Scottish philosopher and historian (1711–1776), the Enlightenment's great skeptic, and the thinker conservatism has claimed more often than it has read. He is in the vault because three of his arguments are load-bearing for the right's intellectual tradition — and because the tradition has taken from each of them something close to the opposite of what he meant. ## The three arguments **Induction.** We have no rational basis for expecting the future to resemble the past; we expect it from habit. The argument (in the *Treatise*, 1739, and the *Enquiry*, 1748) woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," and its conservative use is [[Michael Oakeshott]]'s and [[Friedrich Hayek]]'s: since reason cannot ground our practices, practice must ground itself, and inherited institutions carry knowledge no planner can reconstruct ([[Spontaneous Order]]). **Is and ought.** No description of what is can by itself yield a conclusion about what ought to be — the gap the *Treatise* notices and every later naturalist has tried to close. The right cites it against progressive claims that science settles values; it applies with equal force to claims that tradition or nature does. **Reason as slave of the passions.** Reason cannot motivate; it can only serve ends that sentiment supplies. The conservative reading — [[Edmund Burke]]'s prejudice, the priority of feeling and custom over rationalist schemes — is real, and so is the other reading: Hume's morality was a morality of sympathy and utility, secular to the bone. ## The politics Hume was a Tory by temperament and a Whig by conclusion, a defender of the 1688 settlement, a skeptic about the social contract, and the author of a *History of England* that made him rich and that the Whigs hated. He was also an atheist for all practical purposes — the *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion* were published posthumously because he knew what they would cost — an opponent of the "enthusiasm" of religious politics, a friend of [[Adam Smith]] (who wrote the account of his calm death that scandalized the pious), and an early theorist of commercial society as the engine of liberty. The conservatism that reaches for him wants the skepticism about reform without the skepticism about religion, and the reverence for custom without the argument that custom is all there is. The [[Scottish Enlightenment]] pages ([[Adam Smith]], [[Spontaneous Order]]) have the milieu; [[Philosophy Hub]] the tradition. ## See Also - [[Adam Smith]] · [[Edmund Burke]] · [[Michael Oakeshott]] · [[Friedrich Hayek]] · [[Spontaneous Order]] · [[Philosophy Hub]]