In David Hume's science of human nature every self is located by passions that bind it to groups, repel it from other groups, and rank it on a hierarchy: we call this discovery a `topology of the passions'. These bound and ranked selves and groups form the matter of what he called `government', a supposedly neutral model of political action designed to avoid the malady of faction and catapult Scotland out of feudalism into a glorious future as a commercial society, assisted by the application of the new discipline of political economy, a discipline blind beyond its functional measures of privileged variables - the growth of trade, interest rates, wage levels - measures that justify the destruction of all obstacles to the wholesale liberation of the commercial passions. To govern - a new kind of action for a new epoch - is to destroy and liberate. But ever since Hume, government has fallen apart because it fails to take into account the complexity of society as a topology of the passions. It is through a close analysis of Hume's account of the English Revolution in The History of England that we find an alternative to government: in his ambivalent report on the impact and danger of another model of political action - democratic enthusiasm - wherein to act is to incarnate an idea of commonality. Moreover, it is also in Hume's History that we glimpse the springs and workings of fortune in politics: models of political action woven together, unravelling, re-woven, any `ought' or any `necessity' foundering in a sea of contingency. We see how the efficacy of a politics is sown together by speech acts and their shaping of time in a topology of passions.
