Hutcheson, Hume, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Undesigned Order Before It Had a Name

The Country That Made David Hume Refused to Hire Him

In the spring of 1745 a man of thirty-four sat down in Edinburgh to defend himself anonymously against charges of atheism and skepticism, because a chair had come open at the university in his own city and he wanted it. It did not work. The clergy organized, the town council gave the post to William Cleghorn, and six years later Glasgow refused him too. David Hume, the philosopher most students of the subject would name the most important ever to write in English, never held a teaching post in his life — and the university system that turned him away was the single most important reason his country was able to produce him.

Episode 12 of Self-Evident opens Arc Four and the Scottish arc. It begins with the conditions: a kingdom that lost Darien and then argued itself into a union it did not agree about, a Kirk that put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, and that in the same generation urged the vigorous execution of the law against a twenty-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy in January 1697 a short walk from where Hume would be born fourteen years later. Five universities against England’s two, open to men Oxford and Cambridge would not admit. An old town compressed onto a single ridge, where a judge and a printer and a professor drank in the same tavern because there was no other tavern.

Then the arguments. Francis Hutcheson lecturing in English rather than Latin from 1730, telling a room of fourteen-year-olds — one of them newly arrived from Kirkcaldy — that moral approval arrives before the reasoning does, and being charged by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1738 for teaching that a person may know good and evil prior to knowing God. Hutcheson holding that every human being is born free, that no conquest confers a right to enslave, that a slave is not property and the children of slaves are born free, and that colonial subjects oppressed by their rulers may justly overthrow them — an argument reprinted in America and carried to a Pennsylvania schoolroom by Francis Alison, whose pupils included three men who would sign the Declaration.

And then Hume, who took apart the case this series has spent four articles building. He denied that reason founds moral judgment. He denied that justice is a natural virtue. He took the original contract apart with more care than his reputation credits, and then wrote the sentence almost nobody quotes: that consent is the best and most sacred foundation of government where it has place. What he built to replace the contract is the reason he belongs here. Two men pulling the oars of a boat coordinate without a promise. Languages are established gradually by convention without any founding assembly. Gold and silver become the measures of exchange because each person accepts them expecting the next person will. Each of those is more intricate than anything a committee ever built, and not one of them had a designer.

The episode does not leave that comfortable. It dates Hume’s footnote on race precisely, walks the revision history through 1768 and 1770 and the posthumous edition of 1777, and reports honestly that whether Beattie’s public demolition of it caused the revision is a live scholarly dispute rather than a settled fact. It puts the conservative objection at full strength — that a doctrine about the wisdom of unplanned institutions tells against every reformer, including the Americans of 1776. And in the Liberty Test it turns the knowledge argument against something the host wants, and concedes what the argument cannot do: it can warn you about the limits of what a planner knows, and it cannot by itself tell you to end an inherited injustice. Something else had to do that work.

The question this program keeps asking: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 The Strange Case of David Hume03:29 Episode