Epistemology and Politics

Abstract

I shall attempt to refute the idea, which goes back at least to Hume¹ of the independence of philosophical and political ideas by working out the serious political implications of Hume’s empiricist account of the genesis of factual knowledge. In a lecture published in 1947 and entitled “Philosophy and Politics”, Bertrand Russell argued that an empiricist view of knowledge does have political implications. With this I agree. But whereas he claimed that empiricism is ‘the only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy in its temper of mind’ (p. 20), I shall argue that empiricism, at any rate as formulated by Hume, affords a theoretical condemnation of the kind of democracy we enjoy in the West.