The significant element in Hume's political ideas lies not so much in the particular arguments employed, but rather in the sensitivity displayed towards the workings of actual institutions. Like his contemporaries, he appeared to use the analytical method to dissect institutions, to peel off layer after layer of historical accretion. Yet, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, Hume's method proceeded on the belief that a particular institution was to be viewed as a whole possessing subtle interconnections with other institutional wholes.
Implicit in this approach were two ideas which were to play a central role in later conservative thinking in England. Institutions were to be understood in terms of human needs, but institutions were not merely the product of human needs. The two elements became intertwined and inseparable by virtue of their common root in historical time. It followed that there was no necessary opposition between what was useful and what existed; the desirable and the factual were not out of joint. In this way Hume indicated to later conservatives that the strongest arguments for the existing order were to be found within the facts of that order; that under an empirical approach utility could be located as an immanent value dwelling within the interstices of actual social arrangements, not as a grim measuring rod contrived to reveal the shortcomings of institutions.
Moreover, institutions were developments over a period of time. Their purpose and nature could not be correctly understood without a sense of time. The concept of time, then, was closely associated with the blending of fact and utility. Historical time imparted to social arrangements a qualitative element. Time implied experience, and experience in turn provided the motive for gradual adjustment. Conversely, the greatest calamity was violent change, which worked to snap the close union which history had fashioned between an institution, its utility, and its duration. In contradicting the nature of time and experience, sweeping change could not adapt institutions according to utility; for utility, in political matters, was inseparable from time and experience.
(Sheldon S. Wolin, "Hume and Conservatism," The American Political Science Review 48 [December 1954]: 999-1016, at 1007)
Note from KBJ: Many progressives cannot understand how someone could oppose the redefinition of "marriage." Because of this, they impute bad motives, such as "homophobia," to their opponents. They would be well advised to read Hume. When they do, they will realize that the mental block is in them, not in their opponents. Conservatism has more intelligence in its little finger than progressivism has in its entire body.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 