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Hume's Philosophical Politics. By Forbes Duncan. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. xiii + 338. $27.50.)

This book is pre-eminently a study of the Hume of history, a figure somewhat disregarded by philosophers even in the bicentennial of his death in August 1776. To those whose concern is to make Hume speak again in a context of twentieth-century thought, Forbes offers a reconstruction rigorously historical in at least two senses. In the first place, the Hume we meet is Hume the historian and commentator upon the politics of his own times, understanding of which they were to be viewed. In the second, it is Forbes's constant intention to warn us of the difficulty and near-impossibility of any consistent interpretation of the historical Hume's sustained meaning. "Hume is terrible campaign country," he says at the outset. "No interpretation ever seems to get going before it is pulled up almost immediately by some difficulty. The more of his writings one takes into account, the less confident one feels that one can ever break through.... And this perhaps is the ultimate mystery of Hume's 'scepticism,' which the devotees eventually attain to" (pp. vii-ix).