He attended Montrose Academy, where he knew the older James Mill; and from 1790 was apprenticed to a local surgeon-apothecary, John Bale.

[6] In 1812, Hume obtained through Spencer Perceval a seat in Parliament for Weymouth, Dorset, England, vacant by the death of Sir John Johnstone, 6th Baronet.

[13] Hume renewed his friendship with James Mill: they both and Place were interested in the school project of a West London Lancasterian Association floated in 1813.

[14][15] The project took a turn for the worse in 1814, when Francis Burdett intervened and imposed on it his associate Thomas Evans and Arthur Thistlewood, pushing out Place who then abandoned politics for four years.

[16] By the next decade Hume was identified with the group of followers of Mill and Jeremy Bentham known as the Philosophical Radicals, with organ the Westminster Review.

[17] At this period Hume also aimed to become a director of the East India Company, a position he described in an 1813 speech as an "arduous and most respectable office".

[2][18] When Hume was returned to Parliament once more in 1818, as member for the Aberdeen Burghs, Borders, Scotland, it was with the support of William Maule.

[19][20][21] In Aberdeen's local politics, Hume was at odds with a largely Tory town council, but had supporters including Alexander Bannerman.

[22] Faced in 1829 with a serious challenge from Sir James Carnegie, 5th Baronet, with a Brechin base, Hume decided to change seat.

[23] In March 1830, with Henry Hunt and Daniel O'Connell, Hume set up the London-based Metropolitan Political Union, with a platform that included manhood suffrage and the secret ballot.

[28] Initially his group could be called (by Viscount Castlereagh) "Creevey, Hume ... and two or three others" who sifted through details; it was nicknamed "The Mountain", from the Montagnards in France of the 1790s.

[32] The retrenchment issue gained Hume praise from William Cobbett, and his criticism of the ultra-Protestant line on Ireland also drew support.

[33] Opposing the Canning administration in 1827, however, Henry Brougham wrote to Sir Robert Wilson that the Whigs "shall have no connection with Hume & Co. and the Benthamites", while expecting their votes 90% of the time.

Alexander Somerville wrote about the formation in 1830 of the Grey ministry: We one and all thought it wrong that Joseph Hume should not be a member of the new government.

[36] At the period of the 1835 Lichfield House Compact, Hume's plan to unite the parliamentary radicals with Daniel O'Connell's followers proved divisive.

[42] He thought the inducement of a proportion of army commissions should be reserved for soldiers drawn from the ranks, an idea strongly opposed by the Duke of Wellington on social grounds.

A subscription fund established a Joseph Hume Scholarship, in jurisprudence and political economy, at University College London.

"[69] In 1837 Hume initiated a plan for a memorial to the Scottish Political Martyrs, victims of the Pitt administration's policy of the 1790s.

In February 1852, a second monument to the Scottish Political Martyrs, again initiated by Hume, was unveiled at Nunhead Cemetery, London.