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Today we tend to read David Hume's Essays, Moral, Political and Literary in the 1777 edition, a two-part collection dating essentially from the early 1740s and then again from the early 1750s, as revised continually by the author until his death in the year of the American Declaration of Independence. Although this is better than reading the essays in anthologies, even the best text that we have ever had (the Liberty Fund's) is a compendious final version rather than a critical edition, one that would lead us not only into what the essays are but also what they were about. Hume's revisions and afterthoughts are, for the most part, duly noted, but never put into perspective; and his intentions at the outset are underplayed or simply ignored (Hume 1777). Yet it would be a great help to have more clarity on this desire for changes, for it is remarkable in Hume's career. When, very shortly after publication in 1738, he came to feel reservations about the Treatise of Human Nature, he simply scrapped it and wrote new versions of his philosophy. With the Essays, in contrast, he was more tempted than with any other work published in his lifetime, and more chronically tempted, to revise and adapt his thoughts and then resubmit them to the public. With these labors he was not saving or preparing them for posterity so much as constantly adjusting them to the present as he understood it. This is the kind of evidence that might be cited for a recent claim that the Essays are “contemporary history” (Pocock 1999, vol. ii., p.177ff.).
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