ABSTRACT
While the dramatic personal quarrel between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume has received a great deal of scholarly attention, their ideas and outlooks have rarely been compared in a serious way. This essay examines their nearly antithetical views of the liberal, commercial order that was emerging in their time. In his two Discourses, Rousseau contended that the spread of the arts and sciences, luxury, and commerce was making people less virtuous, less united, less free, and less happy, while in his Political Discourses Hume held that it was bringing about improvements on all of these scores.
