In the third volume of the History of England, David Hume considers the political ramifications of the Protestant reformation with a “Digression concerning the ecclesiastical state.” He advocates the establishment of a state church, believing it will dampen religious “enthusiasm” in the polity. Unlike later secularization theorists, Hume assumes an intractable basis for religion in the human passions. Tensions in Hume’s “cooptation” strategy are evident from Adam Smith’s famous attack upon it in section five of The Wealth of Nations, and (...) in Hume’s own treatment of seventeenth century independency in the fifth volume of the History. Smith argues that public competition among sects facilitates political moderation. In History V Hume stresses the positive role of enthusiasm in fostering civil liberty. This article traces Hume’s indecision to his “external” mode of moral and historical analysis, arguing that a secular policy on religion cannot proceed fruitfully without engaging the theological particulars of the religions at issue. (shrink)

David Hume’s position on religion is, broadly speaking, “politic”: instrumental and consequentialist. Religions should be tolerated or not according to their effects on political peace and order. Such theories of toleration are often rejected as immoral or unstable. The reading provided here responds by reading Hume’s position as one of radically indirect consequentialism. While religious policy should serve consequentialist ends, making direct reference to those ends merely gives free reign to religious-political bigotry and faction. Toleration, like Hume’s other “artificial virtues” (...) (justice, fidelity to promises, allegiance to government), is a universally useful response to our universal partiality—as established uniformity, however tempting, is not. This implies that toleration can progress through political learning, becoming broader and more constitutionally established over time. A sophisticated Humean approach thus shares the stability and normative attractiveness of respect- or rights-based arguments while responding more acutely and flexibly to problems the former often slights: antinomian religious extremism; underdefined political agency; and internationalized, politicized religious movements. (shrink)

This paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part (...) 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime. (shrink)