Mikko Tolonen

Politeness, Paris and the Treatise

This article analyses Humes notion of politeness as developed in a letter he wrote in Paris in 1734 and the account of the corresponding artificial virtue in the Treatise. The analysis will help us understand Humes admiration for French manners and why politeness is presented as one of the central artificial virtues in the Treatise. Before the Treatise, Hume had already sided with Bernard Mandevilles theoretical outlook which stood in contrast to the popular eighteenth-century understanding of politeness as a natural quality of human nature. In the Treatise, Hume developed these notions about the artificial nature of politeness into one of the cornerstones of his account of human sociability.

The Exchange Between Mandeville and Berkeley

George Berkeley directed an ad hominem attack on Bernard Mandeville in his Alchiphron. Although rarely analysed in secondary literature, this and the following exchange, was an important occasion in history of philosophy that contemporaries probably followed closely. The idea of this paper is to offer an analysis of Mandeville’s subsequent answer to Berkeley’s accusations offering an interpretation that situates this in the context of Mandeville’s intellectual development. The relevance that this paper claims to have is that it shows in practice what Mandeville’s intellectual development meant in eighteenth-century debates on political economy and how this relates to an equally important question about nature of moral knowledge. The paper will also take into consideration John Hervey as an outside commentator on the polemic between Mandeville and Berkeley.

The idea of commercial society in the Scottish Enlightenment

eenth-century Epicureanism should be understood. In recent decades, the term Epicurean has been brought to prominence by historians of eighteenth-century political thought (such as Istvan Hont, James Moore, John Robertson, and Edward Hundert, among others), who have used it to clarify what they regard as one of the Enlightenment’s – and particularly the Scottish Enlightenment’s – defining intellectual endeavors: the search for a compelling theory of human sociability. In their work, Epicurean usually refers, broadly speaking, to those eighteenthcentury theorists who considered the foundation of social cohesion and economic flourishing to be ultimately a species of self-interest intrinsic to human nature. Working in the orbit of this historiography, Lifschitz, too, places the search for a theory of human sociability at the center of his account of the Enlightenment (4–5), but he employs the term Epicurean somewhat differently. Rather than a label specifically for champions of self-interest, it becomes in his book a much more general label for those who, apparently if not explicitly or directly taking Lucretius or Epicurus as their starting point, tried to explain the emergence of human society, in all its artifice, as the result of natural causes. Defined this way, Epicureanism belongs to the very essence of the Enlightenment. Far more common than one might otherwise have thought, it encompassed even the ideas of theologians such as Michaelis, whose religious commitments it “in no way undermined” (141). By implication, then, Language and Enlightenment offers historians of the Enlightenment not only a perspective from which to understand the Enlightenment as religious, but also a salutary warning about nomenclature: by virtue of their ambiguities and their tendency toward reification, “Epicurean, and other widely applied labels often conceal more than they reveal about the diverse features of eighteenth-century thought” (141).