David Hume was characterized as “the first conservative philosopher” by the eminent Hume scholar Donald W. Livingston. According to philosopher Antony Flew, “Hume, rather than Burke, was the true intellectual founding father of the modern conservative tradition.” The subtitle of historian Jerry Z. Muller’s important anthology Conservatism (1997) tells us that its contents range “from David Hume to the present.”

It is not hard to see the grounds for affording Hume this honor. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher was famously critical of the idea that political obligation derives from a social contract, a central theme of early modern liberalism. Before Edmund Burke, he attacked the rationalist style of politics that aims radically to remake society overnight in light of some novel theory. French traditionalists found his writings highly useful when developing arguments against revolutionaries. Hume’s defense of “common life” against the fanatics and ideologues who would replace it with their own fevered visions puts him firmly in a tradition of thought that continued through Burke and down to Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton.

Yet, it is also not hard to see why the characterization of Hume as a conservative would strike many as odd, even jarring. He is best known today as the preeminent philosophical skeptic, who sought to undermine commonsense conceptions of the self, causality, material substance, and moral value. To be sure, modern commentators emphasize that Hume only attacks traditional philosophical justifications of these commonsense notions, rather than our commonsense convictions themselves, which he took to be hardwired into us. But that the latter can survive unscathed the rejection of the former is a dubious proposition.

So hostile was Hume to traditional metaphysics that he notoriously judged that we ought to “commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” This would include the works of thinkers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, heroes to a great many conservatives. Then, of course, there is his famous animus against religion, which he dismissed as “sick men’s dreams” and against which he developed lines of argument that would become the stock-in-trade of atheist polemic, in both its academic and its pop “New Atheist” guises. Hume’s skepticism and his hostility to traditional philosophy and religious belief have the same root, namely his radical empiricism.

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It would be natural to wonder whether Hume’s politics might float free of his empiricism, so that we could accept the one while rejecting the other. Aaron Alexander Zubia’s excellent new book, The Political Thought of David Hume, dispels this illusion. Hume’s political philosophy is in fact deeply rooted in his radical empiricism and its revolutionary implications, and is intended to transform social life in light of those implications. This philosophical-cum-political project is one of “despiritualizing the world,” as Zubia, an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Florida, puts it. Zubia shows that Hume was, accordingly, very much a liberal and firmly situated in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls.

To be sure, Hume was, in certain respects, on the more conservative end of the liberal spectrum. But this has led some wrongly to classify him as a liberal conservative, when in fact he was at best a conservative liberal. Even then, as Zubia shows, Hume’s liberalism is far less friendly to tradition than one might suppose from the handful of conservative themes in his work. Zubia subtitles his book The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination, and that imagination has shrunk so that few, even among self-described conservatives, can see beyond what are essentially liberal assumptions. Hume’s work is a major reason for that. Though Zubia does not put it this way, his book shows that Humean “conservatism” is a Trojan Horse, a superficially moderate vehicle by which ideas deeply subversive of traditional morality and religion have conquered the modern Western political consciousness.

A major theme of Zubia’s book is that Hume is part of a larger movement in early modern liberalism that sought to revive a broadly Epicurean conception of religion, nature, and morality. The medieval political order that liberalism aimed to subvert took its philosophical foundations from Scholasticism, which had synthesized key elements of three ancient Greek schools of thought that traced themselves to Socrates—Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. Modern philosophy defined itself by its opposition to Scholasticism, and to its Aristotelian component in particular. A key motivation for this opposition was to undermine the foundations of the medieval political order and establish in their place new philosophical foundations on which a very different, liberal order could be constructed. Many saw in Epicureanism, the Socratic traditions’ great ancient rival, just what they were looking for.

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Where religion is concerned, the Socratic traditions held that there is much that can be established, on the basis of pure reason apart from divine revelation, about the existence and nature of God. Examples would be the proofs of God’s existence and attributes developed by Scholastic thinkers like Anselm, Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. Another central theme of Christian theology was that historical investigation could establish the occurrence of miracles such as the Resurrection. This in turn provided a rational basis for the claim that the prophets through whom the miracles were produced genuinely conveyed to us divinely revealed teaching. On the overall theological picture that resulted, God sustains the world in being at every moment, specially creates each individual immortal soul in his image, and provides, through the Church, the means by which these souls can be saved, and apart from which they are in danger of eternal damnation.

If God is as intimately concerned with human affairs as this implies, if the stakes of getting right with Him are so high, and if all this can be established on firm rational foundations, then it is no surprise that the Church deemed it essential that the state assist her in her mission to save souls. The liberal project of separating Church and state and pushing religion out of the public square and into the private sphere thus required a theological revolution as prolegomenon to its political revolution. Epicureanism provided inspiration, insofar as it conceived of the gods as remote and unconcerned with human affairs and denied that there is any reward or punishment in the hereafter. It showed how one might neutralize theological arguments against liberalism without having to go the whole hog for atheism, which would alienate potential sympathizers. One could instead affirm a vague theism while denying that we can know enough about God’s nature and will, or about the afterlife, to justify the state in favoring any particular religious doctrine.

Thus did Hobbes allow that there is a divine first cause while denying that it lay beyond the material world, that we could know much about its nature, or that we have immortal souls. Thus did Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza invent modern Biblical criticism and use it to undermine scriptural evidence for a higher, supernatural reality. The effect was to reorient the attention of human beings toward this world and its concerns, and strip governments of any rational grounds for thinking that it was their business to assist the Church in preparing souls for a world beyond.

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Zubia recounts how Hume’s contribution to this liberal theological project was threefold. First, in his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume aimed to put paid to the traditional project of rationally demonstrating the existence and nature of God by way of philosophical arguments. The most we can say, the book concludes, is that some kind of cause lay behind the universe, but we cannot know its nature. For example, we cannot know that it is one rather than many, or attribute to it infinite power, moral goodness, or providential concern. Second, in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he argued that we cannot have any rational grounds for holding that a miracle has occurred, and thus we also lack any basis for judging any religious teaching to have been divinely revealed. Third, Hume’s Natural History of Religion claims to show that the existence of religion can be explained in entirely naturalistic terms, by reference to human ignorance of the true causes of things together with passions such as hope and fear.

As Zubia emphasizes, by no means did such arguments reflect some extracurricular interest on Hume’s part, independent of his thinking about political matters. Rather, he argues, “the critique of religion is an essential feature of Hume’s political theory. In fact, it is the starting point.” Like the Epicureans, Hume begins his theorizing about morality and politics with the assumption that the natural world is devoid of inherent purposes or the guidance of divine Providence. The ends to which social life is directed can be dictated only by us, not by God or nature.

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This brings us to another of Zubia’s major themes, which is that, notwithstanding his famous critique of the social contract theorists of his day, Hume was himself essentially a contractarian, and in this too followed the Epicurean tradition. What Hume rejected was the idea that political obligation is grounded in something like a promise to obey the terms of a contract. But he nevertheless took the rules of justice to be conventional rather than natural, and thought that their legitimacy derived from a consent from the populace that arose in a subtle and gradual way rather than in a particular event. The motive for this consent is that such rules serve to further the mutual self-interest of citizens, each of whom is concerned to pursue whatever ends he happens to have, unmolested by others who may have very different ends.

The specific rules that Hume thought arise in this way are those that facilitate a commercial society, such as respect for property rights. And a commercial society is in turn the kind most likely to foster peace and prosperity. The virtues that uphold such a society, and which it in turn inculcates, would be industry, civility, and the like. What would have no place in such a society would be humility, self-denial, and other “monkish virtues,” as Hume famously described them. Of course, these are virtues characteristic of Christian morality, which makes it clear that it is not just the traditional foundations of that morality that Hume rejects, but its content as well.

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In short, what Hume idealized was bourgeois society, in the worst no less than the best sense of that term. That it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God is for Hume a feature rather than a bug of such a society. For if the rich man were to worry about such things, he might practice the monkish virtues rather than those conducive to generating wealth, and he might develop a zeal for promoting orthodoxy and holiness that could unsettle rather than uphold the commercial order.

Hence, while there is obviously a sense in which Hume’s respect for law and order and hostility to ideological fanaticism are conservative, we have to ask exactly what it is he wanted to conserve. The answer is commercial society, and his particular way of conserving it entailed undermining the foundations of any worldview that might point us to something higher, such as Christian theology and the Socratic traditions in philosophy. For conservatives who draw inspiration from these worldviews, Hume’s “conservatism” must be judged a variation on what Pope John Paul II called “the error of economism.” Hume himself must be considered an adversary rather than an ally.

Zubia suggests that there are important connections between Hume’s thought and that of Rawls, the preeminent 20th-century egalitarian liberal. A surprising omission from Zubia’s book is any discussion of Hume’s relationship to Friedrich Hayek, who among recent political thinkers is the one Hume most closely resembles—except that Hayek was less hostile to religion, and more sensitive to the instability of a society that abandons religion. A more thorough analysis of the Humean brand of conservative liberalism would require some consideration of whether Hayek’s emendation might salvage it. (I don’t think that it would.)

All the same, Aaron Alexander Zubia has given us a superb account of the true nature of Hume’s political philosophy, and a salutary reminder to conservatives to think twice about what it is they are conserving.