1001Philosophers

David Hume vs Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Hume and Rousseau are the two major philosophical voices of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment outside France's circle of philosophes. Their famous personal friendship and bitter falling-out have somewhat eclipsed the philosophical relationship between their works.

At a glance

David HumeJean-Jacques Rousseau
Dates1711 – 17761712 – 1778
NationalityScottishGenevan
EraModernModern
Movements Empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment Enlightenment, Social Contract
Profile David Hume → Jean-Jacques Rousseau →

Where they agree

Both rejected ecclesiastical authority in favor of the analysis of human nature, both took the passions seriously as objects of philosophical reflection rather than as obstacles to reason, and both wrote across the conventional boundaries of philosophy and literature.

Where they disagree

Hume's account of human nature is empiricist, naturalistic, and skeptical: passions are the springs of action, reason is their slave, and large-scale moral and political claims are revisable conventions rather than necessary truths. Rousseau's account is moralizing, romantic, and reformist: natural human goodness has been corrupted by civilization, and political philosophy must reconstruct the conditions under which humanity can recover. Hume's tone is ironic and conservative; Rousseau's is earnest and revolutionary.

Representative quotes

David Hume

  • “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

    Part 3, Section 3

  • “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.”

    Variant (perhaps a paraphrase of this passage): It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

  • “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

    Section X: Of Miracles; Part I. 87

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  • “Let's go dance under the elms: Step lively, young lassies. Let's go dance under the elms: Gallants, take up your pipes.”

    Le devin du village (1752)

  • “Le devin du village (1752)”

    Let's go dance under the elms: Step lively, young lassies. Let's go dance under the elms: Gallants, take up your pipes.

  • “All that time is lost which might be better employed.”

    As quoted in A Dictionary of Quotations in Most Frequent Use: Taken Chiefly from the Latin and French, but comprising many from the Greek, Spanish, and Italian Languages, translated into English (1809) by David Evans Macdonnel

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