Hume's Doubts About Politics: A Critique and Reimagining of Social Contract Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines and assesses Hume's skepticism regarding the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Consequently, Hume, in response to the assertions of contractarians who argued that political power is founded on a contract among rational individuals, contended that political authority originates from custom, use, and historical precedent. His critique consequently refutes the function of reason in establishing the legitimacy of political institutions, contending that they develop over time. Hume adopts a radical enlightenment perspective, asserting that every revolution always results in political instability. The paper seeks to elucidate the political theories of David Hume and articulate the relevance of this philosopher's ideas in analyzing contemporary politics and political systems, as well as in assessing which political frameworks should be considered legitimate today. This research analyses Hume's perspectives on custom, gradualism, and the emotional foundation of political authority, providing a comprehensive account of political legitimacy in historical and present contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.122 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".