Francis Hutcheson and David Hume

This chapter focuses on Francis Hutcheson's strong opposition to David Hume. Hutcheson had grasped the meaning of Mandeville’s work. But his religious beliefs drove him to drastically oppose the Mandevillian idea of society understood as an unintentional order. Therefore, Hutcheson’s opposition to Hume is not surprising. It is the contrast between those who still firmly believed (and believe) that the social order should be an intentional product (of men and/or gods) and those who thought (and think) that the motives for the action are irrelevant, that what matters are the results produced by the actions and that the co-adaptation of individual plans can take place without any design (human and/or divine). This puts in the meridian light two ways of conceiving individual life and social life. Also hostile to Bayle and Mandeville, Hutcheson prevented Hume from obtaining the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh. A humanly very sad story, but which constitutes, though often ignored or overlooked, a very significant page in the history of the idea of unintended order.