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Hume's Political Discourses

Chapter 25: NOTES, OF SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS.
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About This Book

The collection gathers concise, empirically minded essays that analyze economic mechanisms—commerce, money, interest, trade balances, taxation, and public credit—alongside reflections on population and customary practices. It also turns to political theory, questioning foundations of government, the doctrine of passive obedience, party coalitions, succession, and the idea of a perfect commonwealth. Arguments rely on historical examples and philosophical reasoning to trace causes and consequences and to propose practical policy inferences. The tone is analytical and accessible, combining moral philosophy with economic observation to illuminate how institutions, laws, and fiscal arrangements shape national prosperity and stability.

NOTES, OF SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS.

34 His harangue for it is still extant: περι Συμμοριας.

35 Plutarchus in vita decem oratorum. Demosthenes gives a different account of this law. (Contra Aristogiton, Orat. II.) He says that its purport was to render the ατιμοι επιτιμοι, or to restore the privilege of bearing offices to those who had been declared incapable. Perhaps these were both clauses of the same law.

36 The senate of the Bean was only a less numerous mob chosen by lot from among the people, and their authority was not great.

37 In Ctesiphontem. It is remarkable that the first step after the dissolution of the Democracy by Critias and the Thirty was to annul the γραφη παρανομων, as we learn from Demosthenes κατα Τιμοκ. The orator in this oration gives us the words of the law establishing the γραφη παρανομων, p. 297, ex edit. Aldi. And he accounts for it from the same principles we here reason upon.

38 Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, part 3, § 2.