Dying of cancer, David Hume wrote some notes about his life. The final paragraph is rather moving because he speaks of himself in the past tense:
>To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men, any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: Not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.
David Hume, Adam Smith, James Clerk Maxwell, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, James Watt, Alexander Fleming, Lord Kelvin - the list goes on... For such a tiny nation Scotland has truly had a remarkable influence on “modernity”.
Probably they can thank John Knox's insistence on teaching everyone in Scotland to read for much of the country's competitive advantage in all those things that benefit from literacy.
Great book, highly recommend. Before this book, I had no idea of the prevalence of Scottish enlightenment. Incredible contribution to the modern world, especially per capita.
Only tangentially related, but David Hume and Benjamin Franklin were close friends. Franklin has always stuck me as a very modern thinker for his time, too. I'd long admired both Hume and Franklin, but didn't realize they were close friends until I dug in and read a Franklin biography a few years back.
Franklin actually stayed with Hume in Edinburgh for a while. I'm sure the Philadeplhia to London to Edinburgh trek was a tad more involved in the 1700s than it is today. :)
Great book and what an amazing human being! I remember it covered some of his time in England, but don't recall him staying with Hume. I read it quite a while ago though...
I started with that one - I liked Isaacson's writing when I read his Steve Jobs biography, so I decided to read his Franklin bio as well. I very much enjoyed it. Afterward, I read this one:
I think this one is probably where I read about his time with Hume. I don't find H.W. Brands' writing to be quite as smooth to read as Isaacson's, but I remember him covering parts of Franklin's life in greater detail. His bio of Ulysses Grant was a great read, too:
I admit I've never been terribly interested in Grant, maybe I should give him a look. Tough when there's an infinite abundance of great literature. We're truly spoiled.
And just further on, this brilliant quote from Adam Smith
> "After Rousseau departed England for Calais, Smith asked, “What has become of Rousseau? Has he gone abroad, because he cannot continue to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?”
It should be noted that Smith's warning about the potential for merchants to collude is not an endorsement of government intervention to prevent such collusion. The collusion warning is followed by:
>It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. . . . A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.
Which again shows Smith viewed the respect for freedom as a moral imperative.
When freedom is defined as freedom within the capitalist mode of production for bourgeois interests to collude, I suppose you're right. He also said that the state, as it is instituted for the protection of property, is instituted as a device used in benefit of the rich for the detriment of the poor.
I find Marx's critique of classical political economy to be more valuable, and the thinking it inspired. The quality of the freedom offered by the social anarchists (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Bookchin) I also think is much higher than Smith's.
The application of their ideas in Catalonia was respected by Orwell when he stayed there (he even wrote a book about it, Homage to Catalonia). The current situation in Syria has spawned a man inspired by Bookchin's anarchism to start Rojava, which is a secular and multi-ethnic society in the region, fighting ISIS and against the Turkish forces which want to eliminate them.
That's not an argument against anarchism. I also wouldn't want to live in many other places, nor would I want to live there. The point is that it is a place Syrians want to live, as in, it is significantly better than theocratic regimes in the region, and much fairer to all.
I really don't know how you can consider what you said to be against anarchism.
My point is I typically judge governments by their ability to create a place where people would like to live and I have to say Syria is pretty low on most peoples lists.
But Syria wouldn't be somewhere you want to live regardless of what organisation the anarchists st up there. That's because of the climate and the war in the region, both of which are out of the control of Rojava.
It just doesn't make sense to judge by that metric. What more do you expect Rojava or any government of any ideology in the region to do, other than to fight ISIS?
I find the social-anarchist take on freedom to be more skewed by ideology, while I see Smith's take to be more natural and conventional. Of course the social anarchist would disagree that they're any more ideological than the classical liberal :)
I don't have a high regard for social anarchy and its thinkers, and hold the ideology responsible for much of the unnecessary suffering of the 20th and 21st (modern Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela) century. I also think it is the culprit for the stagnation seen in the West.
>responsible for much of the unnecessary suffering of the 20th and 21st (modern Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela)
Neither Cuba, North Korea nor Venezuela have adopted anarchist theory or praxis. At best, they have claimed to adopt regional variants of Marxism-Leninism and even toward that goal they have failed as is currently visible by their capitalist economies.
>I also think it is the culprit for the stagnation seen in the West.
How is social anarchism the culprit for the perceived "stagnation" in Western countries? And stagnation of what, exactly?
You can't really blame the man or his ideology, though. He didn't specify many of the things which were decided by those governments, and those governments to my knowledge all followed Marxism-Leninism anyway, which has a different revolutionary praxis. And as I said, they weren't even true to that.
You are right in saying that Marxism is anti-economic, but you are wrong in saying that it is bad because of this. Marxism is a critique of political economy which postured that capitalism is the highest form of development, or the most desirable.
Marx himself didn't propound an economic system, he specified what life should look like under a Communist system. As such, many varities have sprung up, from market Socialism to full economic planning (which contrary to what Mises would have you believe, is possible and has been worked upon by Cockshott et al.)
When I say anti-economic, I mean anti-economic-development, as in the ideas of Marxism being incongruent with the truths of social and market reality, and thus highly disruptive to an environment where society can organise itself to meet people's economic needs.
There is a wide consensus in the field of Economics that central economic planning is fundamentally flawed as a system of economic organisation. This flaw relates to the nature of knowledge and its distribution throughout society. In my opinion, Marxism's conceptual shortcomings are why it has been associated with so much misery over last century and a half.
A biblical verse is unusually apt in this case:
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits."
>To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men, any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: Not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.
https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/humelife.html