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The 1742 essays ‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’, taken together, demanded to be read as, in effect, Hume's explanation of why he did not think of himself as able to continue with moral philosophy's traditional project of emotional therapy and improvement of character, and why, as moral philosopher, he concerned himself with the purely explanatory task of identifying the factors which determine moral judgement. Hume liked to portray himself an anatomist of the moral life – and as an anatomist also of politics. He made a much more serious attempt than was common at the time to rise above factionalism and to discuss politics with genuine impartiality, in the interests of understanding the deeper forces threatening the much-vaunted constitutional settlement of 1688. And in his writings on commerce, there were none of the usual pleas of books on trade for this or that piece of legislative reform, in the interests of this or that part of the mercantile or manufacturing community. The ‘chief business’ of both philosophers and politicians, Hume wrote in ‘Of Commerce’, was ‘to regard the
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James A. Harris (Hume: An Intellectual Biography)