David Hume

Richard Whatmore, Knud Haakonssen, Knud Haakonssen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351946216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This volume on Hume's politics brings together essays that have been formative of the scholarly and more general debate about Hume's political thought. Unlike many theorists who express their thought in terms of system, Hume uses the incidental genre of the essay as the vehicle for his writing and his mode of presentation is a reflection, indeed an expression, of his belief in the limited power of reason to give any over-all shape to human life. Hume's politics are particularly suited for discussion of a wide range of view-points. The possibilities of seeing in Hume both the conservative and the liberal are pursued along with Hume's sophisticated analysis of party-politics. His acute and pioneering theorisation of perhaps the most central issue for 18th-century political observers, that of commerce and politics, is brought out in the context of his ideas of the international order. His fundamental theory of justice is discussed in its connection with law, property and government.

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Hume’s Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition*

JAMES MOORE

Concordia University

I

Hume’s political thought, no less than his epistemology, his ethics and his historical work, stands at a turning point in eighteenth-century thought. And the best means of locating his intentions and of grasping the significance of his political writings may be to examine them in the context of the political thinkers to whom he has responded and the thinkers who were in turn provoked by him. Hume, it should not be forgotten, was always a voracious reader. “I was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life and the great source of my enjoyments,” he has told us.¹ And he once remarked that a wife was not one “of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of them; and I have more than I can use.”² The remarkable range of his reading is reflected in the variety of contexts in which his social and political thinking might be located.

His theory of justice and property forms one of the crucial links in the transition from the emphasis on natural law and Roman jurisprudence in the teaching of law in the Scottish universities in the early decades of the eighteenth century to the theoretical or natural history approaches of the various members of the Scottish enlightenment in the second half of the century. His criticisms of the speculative principles of the Whig and the Tory parties, the principles of the original contract and of passive obedience, were equally indispensable in the displacement of those traditional theories of English government and society by the radically different approach to law and politics initiated by Bentham and the English utilitarians.

But there is another context of political speculation which may bear more directly on Hume’s intentions as a political scientist as revealed in his Essays, Moral and Political and in his Political Discourses. It is his response to a tradition of political speculation which included, as he once said, “some of the greatest geniuses of the nation.”³ They included Bolingbroke and his associates, John Toland, Andrew Fletcher, Algernon Sidney and many others. The tradition to which they belonged has been characterized as the tradition of the English commonwealthman;⁴ or following the names of its greatest proponents, as neo-Harringtonianism,⁵ and as one of the English faces of Machiavelli.⁶ But it is still perhaps most familiar to us, following Zera Fink, as the classical republican tradition.⁷ It will be the gravamen of my argument in this paper that Hume’s political science can best be understood as an elaborate response to the political science of the classical republicans. And I will further suggest that for experimental political scientists, at least, the classical republican tradition comes to an end with the political science of Hume.

II

In the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume characterized the study of politics as the science of men “united in society and dependent on each other.” The science of politics, along with the sciences of logic, morals and criticism, seemed to him to comprise almost everything of importance in the study of human affairs. But of the four rudimentary sciences of human nature, morals and criticism came to be regarded by him as belonging more to the realm of taste and feeling than to the scientific world of the understanding. He entertained no such reservations, however, about politics, which remained for him an experimental science, comparable with the natural sciences in the scope or object of its investigation. “The sciences, which treat of general facts,” he said in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “are politics, natural philosophy, physics and chemistry, etc. where the qualities, causes and effects of a whole species of objects are enquired into.”⁸ In classifying politics with the natural sciences, Hume was not suggesting that politics was a science capable of demonstration or quantification. He meant rather that political science was a science which must be based, like physics or chemistry, on observation and experiment, on the impressions and ideas of the senses. And, as in the natural sciences, the object of political science was the discovery of general truths, or generalizations substantiated by observation and experiment.

La science politique de Hume et la tradition républicaine classique

La science politique de Hume marque un point tournant dans l’histoire de la pensée politique. On peut mieux apprécier sa signification si on la considère comme une réponse structurée aux essais de construction d’une science politique fondée sur l’expérience tentés par les théoriciens de la tradition républicaine classique. Sa discussion des formes de gouvernement, du régime mixte en Grande Bretagne, du rôle des législateurs, de l’influence du gouvernement sur le comportement social, des sources de la puissance militaire, de la sagesse d’acquérir des colonies, des mérites de la politique de la Grèce et de Rome dans l’Antiquité, et en dernier lieu, sa conception d’une république parfaite, tous ces thèmes font partie d’une réponse systématique aux oeuvres de Machiavel, Harrington, Bolingbroke et autres. La conception de Hume du gouvernement constitutionnel dérive d’une application plus consistante du raisonnement expérimental au domaine politique. Sa science politique offre donc une nouvelle théorie du gouvernement républicain qui a eu une profonde influence sur les penseurs américains, notamment Hamilton et Madison. Ces derniers y trouvèrent une conception du politique qui pouvait être appliquée aux grandes sociétés mercantiles.

There were, to be sure, certain difficulties in formulating generalizations in political science. There was first of all the unpredictability or contingency of political conduct, not just of particular political actions, but of whole areas or realms of public affairs.⁹ There was also the peculiar susceptibility of political life to radical, often violent changes. How was generalization possible about public affairs, when “whatever anyone should advance on that head would, in all probability, be refuted by further experience Such mighty revolutions have happened in human affairs, and so many events have arisen contrary to the expectations of the ancients that they are sufficient to beget the suspicion of still further changes.”¹⁰ The challenge for the political scientist was somehow to rescue his generalizations from a world characterized by the conditions of contingency and radical change. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume adumbrated certain rules which scientists should follow when they employ the experimental method.¹¹ It may be helpful to recall those rules in this connection and suggest how they might be applied to meet the special problems presented by the world of politics.

The first three rules of experimental method proposed by Hume were a highly condensed recapitulation of his understanding of the relation between a cause and an effect. The cause and the effect, he said, must be contiguous in space and time; the cause must be temporally prior to the effect; and there must be a constant conjunction of the two ideas in experience. The relevance of these rules for the political scientist was that they directed him to search for contiguities, regularities and constant conjunctions in political behaviour. However unpredictable or merely contingent political actions might appear, the political scientist might discover, in applying the rules of the experimental method to politics, the forms or conventions which permit regular or uniform behaviour in the public realm. The reduction of politics to a science meant, first of all, the discovery of the forms of constitutional behaviour.

Following this methodological canon, Hume proposed another which he called “the source of most of our philosophical reasonings.”¹² This was the rule that to the same causes one must assign the same effects. This too was a principle of uniformity, but it represented another dimension of the uniformity of nature and the uniformity of human nature. In the sciences of physical nature, it referred to the resemblance of certain parts of nature to other parts, “… as to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflections of light in the earth, and in the planets.”¹³ In the science of politics, the implication of this general rule was simply that human nature in different times and in different places must always be assumed to be the same. The assumption that human nature is uniform was not intended by Hume to preclude or expunge evidence of variety and change in human affairs.¹⁴ It was intended rather to suggest that if human nature remains the same at all times and in all places, then differences in human conduct must be explained in terms of those circumstances in which men differ;¹⁵ and those circumstances were nothing but the artificial or conventional arrangements of social and political life.

From the standpoint of the political scientist, then, the conventions and institutions of social and political life were to be regarded as experiments, as uncertain trials of judgment by which politicians have attempted to contrive a world consistent with the uniform needs and wants of human beings. “These records of wars, intrigues, factions and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals and external objects by the experiments which he makes concerning them.”¹⁶ Because the political scientist perceives the efforts of politicians as experiments, it is understandable that the institutions and conventions of human life appear to him to manifest the widest possible variety of forms of government and styles of political conduct. But because it is the same human nature to which these experiments must be applied, their effectiveness or utility may be judged by their capacity to satisfy the uniform requirements of human nature. And thus men learn from the experience or the experiments of others. And a science of politics, conceived in the experimental manner, is a practical as well as a scientific activity. For if it is part of the vocation of an experimental political scientist to judge forms of government and policy in terms of their usefulness to human nature, then it is consistent with this role that the political scientist should also recommend certain forms of political life as more useful or effective than others, making due allowance for differences in social and political conditions, and for the claims upon the allegiance of subjects of the legal and governmental arrangements under which they happen to live.

III

This experimental approach to political science was not a wholly original one. Bolingbroke was firmly committed to the experimental method as the only means of achieving a reliable knowledge of nature: “… natural knowledge, the knowledge, I should say, of the system of nature, can never be real, unless it be begun, and carried on, by the painful drudgery of experiment,” he said, in his rambling “Essays on the Nature, Extent and Reality of Human Knowledge.”¹⁷ His insistenc...