Essays Moral and Political
(1741)
The original 1741 edition of the Essays Moral and Political contained 15 essays; another 15 were added (and four suppressed) between 1742 and 1748.
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Etexts:
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- Paperback edition, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Liberty Fund, 1987).
All links verified on or after October 21, 2020
The History of Economic Thought website has a
thorough analysis of Hume's essays and their publication history. I would not have been able to puzzle out exactly what was part of which without their analysis.
The 1741 edition of the Essays, Moral and Political included the following essays:
- On the Delicacy of Taste and Passion
- On the Liberty of the Press
- Of Impudence and Modesty (later suppressed in 1764)
- That Politics may be Reduced to a Science
- Of the First Principles of Government
- Of Love and Marriage (later suppressed in 1764)
- Of the Study of History (later suppressed in 1764)
- Of the Independency of Parliament
- Whether the British Government inclines more to absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic
- Of Parties in general
- Of the Parties of Great Britain
- Of Superstition and Enthusiasm
- Of Avarice (later suppressed in 1764)
- Of the Dignity of Human Nature (re-titled Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature in 1770)
- Of Liberty and Despotism (re-titled Of Civil Liberty in 1758)
Part two of this work, published in 1742, included the following essays:
- Of Essay-Writing (withdrawn from the 1748 edition and suppressed)
- Of Eloquence
- Of Moral Prejudices (withdrawn from the 1748 edition and suppressed)
- Of the Middle Station of Life (withdrawn from the 1748 edition and suppressed)
- Of the Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences
- The Epicurean * -or the man of elegance and pleasure
- The Stoic * -or the man of action and virtue
- The Platonist * -or the man of contemplation and philosophical devotion
- The Skeptic
- Of Polygamy and Divorces
- Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing
- A Character of Sir Robert Walpole (reduced to footnote in the 1748 edition; suppressed in 1770)
The final supplement, published in 1748, included the following essays:
- Of National Characters
-
Of the Original Contract
- Of Passive Obedience
- da Vinci, Leonardo
- Dante Alighieri
- Darwin, Charles
- Defoe, Daniel
- Descartes, René
- de Tocqueville, Alexis
- Dewey, John
- Dickens, Charles
- Diderot, Denis
- Donne, John
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor
- Einstein, Albert
- Eliot, George
- Eliot, T.S.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo
- Engels, Friedrich
- Epictetus
- Epicurus
- Erasmus, Desiderius
- Euclid
- Euripides
- Faraday, Michael
- Fielding, Henry
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Flaccus, Quintus Horatius
- Flaubert, Gustave
- Fourier, Jean-Baptiste Joseph
- Franklin, Benjamin
- Freud, Sigmund
- Galen
- Galileo
- Gibbon, Edward
- Gilbert, William
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
- Gogol, Nikolai
- Gordon, George (Lord Byron)
- Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm
- Hamilton, Alexander
- Harvey, William
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Herodotus
- Hippocrates
- Hobbes, Thomas
- Homer
- Horace
- Hugo, Victor
- Hume, David
- Huygens, Christiaan
- Ibsen, Henrik
- Irving, Washington