David Hume’s place in the history of economic thought
Abstract
The paper examines a total of 43 books dealing with the history of economic thought to see how David Hume’s economics is presented in them. In order to determine Hume’s relative position, special attention is given to Adam Smith, James Steuart, Richard Cantillon, and Francis Hutcheson, who are historically and thematically close to him. The picture that emerges is much more nuanced than that presented in textbooks on the theory of money and international trade. The greatest confusion in the interpretation of Hume’s views on monetary theory stems from the fact that he had two basic theories with two different methods of analysis of changes in the quantity of money relating to two different questions. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, Hume was regarded as a precursor by those who thought in terms of macroaggregates, such as monetarists and Keynesian advocates of aggregate demand stimulation, while more sophisticated and less common approaches, which took into account the effects of money supply growth on relative prices, price structure, and income redistribution, tended to criticise Hume and favour Cantillon instead.
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