ABSTRACT
This intriguing admission by David Hume appeared from 1752 until 1768 in
the essay, ‘‘Of Public Credit,’’ in Political Discourses. Biographical interest
in Hume as an economic theorist and analyst prompts inquiry into the
chronology attached to this statement, and the unfolding of its conceptual
implications. This paper aims to establish what early impressions of this
kind and from later stages of his career probably influenced Hume’s
thinking about economics, especially as these are revealed in his corre-
He was a student at Edinburgh from 1721 to 1725, so let us say his puz-
zlement over the widespread use of the term circulation-which we under-
stand in the broad, commercial sense of transmission of products and
values, and in the narrower sense of issuance of negotiable paper: stocks,
bonds, notes, bills, and receipts (Littre´ 1889, ‘‘circulation’’)—began in the
early 1720s. He was 12 years old or so then, and no doubt precocious,3
therefore likely to have been inquisitive about a farming and business world
in which his elders transferred objects for cash, and negotiated over pieces of paper that somehow represented values and cash, while meantime a dis-
tant government collected taxes and incurred debt by borrowing money on
promises to make timely repayments. This world of commerce, and to some
extent its problems, was delineated in the Spectator papers that were
popular reading of the period, such as issue 174 by Steele, presenting
Sir Andrew Freeport’s defense of commerce (Addison and Steele 1982
[1711-12], 447-54).
