ABSTRACT
It is now approximately 250 years since David Hume published his cele-
brated essays on political economy as part of his Political Discourses (1752).
His work won immediate acclaim and was absorbed directly into the work
of several prominent economic thinkers of the period, most notably Adam
Smith and A.R.J. Turgot. For several decades thereafter, numerous editions
and translations of his essays were issued, leaving a definite imprint on eco-
nomic discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. For much of the twentieth
century, however, Hume was treated as a relatively minor figure in the history of economics, occupying the nebulous territory between mercantilism, phy-
siocracy, and classical political economy. Joseph Schumpeter’s History of
Economic Analysis (1954), for example, addressed Hume’s contributions en
passant, and positioned Richard Cantillon and Turgot as the superior con-
temporaneous economic analysts. Another leading overview, Mark Blaug’s
Economic Theory in Retrospect (1978 [1962]), contains about a dozen references
to Hume in his opening chapter on ‘‘Pre-Adamite Economics,’’ but because
Hume does not fit within a distinct school he is treated incidentally.1
