David Hume 9781501301391, 9780826429803

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Series Editor’s Preface In this compelling account of the life and thought of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, Professor Christopher J. Berry of the University of Glasgow writes that Hume was not a conservative and it would be misleading to label him a libertarian. Such a view clearly begs the question: why is Hume included in a book series devoted to Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers? What are the grounds for placing Hume in the conservative or libertarian tradition of social and political thought? In reality, Hume’s thought may be most effectively categorized as Humean. That is, in common with a number of thinkers in this series, he was a strikingly original thinker whose work defies classification within standard ideological categories. As Berry sets out, at the heart of Hume’s thought was the belief in the uniformity of human nature. Social institutions such as property and government, language and money, have to be established, within inescapable environmental constraints, through conventions. These social institutions are not deliberately designed and constructed, but evolve gradually as an

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unintended consequence of people’s self-interested actions. Rules of just conduct, for example, are not imposed from above by government, but are established gradually through custom and habit where they facilitate mutually advantageous action. Hume combined this appreciation of society as (what would be termed today) a spontaneous order with skepticism towards the ability of human reason to improve upon those institutions that have evolved spontaneously. Hume also provided a compelling defense of commerce and luxury, which he believed to be civilizing and improving forces in contrast to the unsustainable and impoverishing “virtues” of civic republicanism. It is these classic Humean themes of the evolution of social institutions as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of self-interest and the importance of custom and habit in establishing rules of just conduct, coupled with his defense of commerce and luxury, that mark Hume’s unique contribution to the conservative and libertarian traditions. Hence, Humean thought may be understood as a combination of various strands of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism. This volume makes a crucial contribution to the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series by setting out the thought of one of the most important contributors to this tradition; certainly any account of the conservative and libertarian traditions

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would be incomplete without a thorough treatment of Hume’s contribution. In presenting Hume’s thought in such an accessible and cogent form, the author has produced an outstanding volume that will prove indispensable to those relatively unfamiliar with the work of this important thinker as well as more advanced scholars. John Meadowcroft King’s College London

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank my former student and colleague, Craig Smith, for generously putting the opportunity to write this book my way and to John Meadowcroft for his willingness to have me on board. I am grateful to my colleagues in the HINT group of the Glasgow Politics Department for their comments on a version of Chapter 4. I am also indebted (again) to Roger Emerson for his comments on an early draft of Chapter 1. I have published on Hume elsewhere over a number of years and I here appropriate, on occasion, some of my earlier formulations. For the record I have drawn here from my Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. ‘Hume and the Customary Causes of Industry, Knowledge and Humanity’ in History of Political Economy, 38, 2006, 291–317 (Duke University Press). ‘Hume’s Universalism: The Science of Man and the Anthropological Point of View’ in British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 15, 2007, 529–44 (Taylor and Francis/British Society for the History of Philosophy).

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‘Hume and Superfluous Value (or the Problem with Epictetus’ Slippers)’ in C. Wennerlind and M. Schabas (eds) David Hume’s Political Economy, 2008, pp. 49–64, (London: Routledge). Christopher J. Berry University of Glasgow

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Hume: A Life of Letters Hume wrote an autobiography. It might be thought this would be a fundamental thread along which could be strung a narrative of his life and times. There are, however, good grounds to be wary of placing too much reliance on his account of “my own life.” This is not only because any and every autobiography is to a greater or lesser extent a “disguised novel” as Clive James said of his aptly named Unreliable Memoirs (1980) but also because Hume’s account was a deliberately studied performance that was only to be published posthumously; it thus has much of the character of an epitaph as it encapsulates his life-story as “the struggling author made good” (Hanley, 2002: 680). Nor is it “confessional.” Unlike his contemporary Rousseau’s path-breaking version, Hume is far from displaying a “portrait in every way true to nature” where the picture is the unique self (Rousseau, 1954: 17). (As we will see Hume and Rousseau’s paths eventfully crossed.) The nearest Hume comes to any self-revelation is the identification of “his love of literary fame” as “his ruling passion” (E-Life: xl).

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My aim in this chapter is to sketch out an outline of Hume’s life, paying particular attention to the occasion or circumstances of his significant works. It will also be apt to incorporate some remarks on his relation to his contemporary intellectual world—the Enlightenment—both in his native Scotland and in France where he resided on a couple of occasions. David Home was born on April 26, 1711 in Edinburgh. “Home” was the dominant spelling of a name that was common in the southeast of Scotland and David’s elder brother, John, as did his cousin Henry, the philosopher and lawyer (who took the legal title of Lord Kames), retained that form. The name was, however, pronounced “Hume” and David chose to adapt the spelling of his name to echo the pronunciation. There is no definitive evidence when this occurred but his biographers Mossner (1980: 90) and Graham (2004: 44) date it to his residence in Bristol in 1734 or perhaps earlier when he left home. The family home was Ninewells in the parish of Chirnside close to Berwick-on-Tweed, on the coast at the England-Scotland border. This was a small estate and Hume says in his autobiography that the family was not rich (E-Life: xxxii). His father died in 1713. This meant that his mother was the “head of the household,” which contained not only the elder brother but also a younger sister, Katharine, who later became his housekeeper in his various Edinburgh

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houses. Since John would have to stay to run the estate, and given its limited income, then David would have known from an early age that he would have to have an occupation. He retrospectively attributes to himself “being seized very early with a passion for literature” (E-Life: xxxii–iii). In 1721 he attended Edinburgh University where he stayed for four years. Though only 10 this is not a mark of precocity, and even if it was probably advanced because his brother was already a student, it was a common practice to attend as a youngster. Adam Smith, for example, attended Glasgow when he was 14. Hume is unforthcoming about his studies, saying only that, instead of studying law, the only pursuit to which he was not averse was “philosophy and general learning.” While Hume supplies no information, considerable endeavor has been spent trying to recreate what he did in fact study and what impact such study might have had on his subsequent thought, though the most recent and thorough account concludes there are “no grounds to think that Hume caught the philosophical bug at college” (Stewart, 2005: 25). Edinburgh had only just (1708) abolished the system of “regents,” whereby one teacher taught a whole cohort the whole syllabus, and replaced it with professors in distinct disciplines. We know Hume studied Logic with Drummond, Greek with Scott, Latin (Humanity) with Dundas, Natural Philosophy with Steuart, and (perhaps) Moral Philosophy

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with Law. Despite this differentiation the education was suffused with an edifying mission to inculcate “virtuous living in a society regulated by religious observance” (Stewart, 2005: 12). Hume left University in 1725 (without graduating). He seemingly began and then abandoned training for a career as a lawyer. While in his later correspondence Hume reveals knowledge of jurisprudence (which is also apparent from the Treatise of Human Nature published when he was 28), his earliest surviving letter of July 1727 refers to his time (at Ninewells) spent reading classical philosophy (Cicero) and poetry (Virgil) rather than legal texts (L: I, 10). It is a reasonable inference that it was in this period that Hume began to immerse himself in the world of books—his “interests” always remained literary rather than musical or, more generally, aesthetic (Emerson, 2007). Perhaps as a consequence of this immersion, and with a legal career foresworn together with the need to make a living, Hume appears to have had what is by all accounts a nervous breakdown. There is a remarkable letter written to an unnamed physician in 1734 that recounts his activity and state of mind in the late 1720s. Typically his autobiography merely alludes to his “health being a little broken by my ardent application” (E-Life: xxxiii). This “application” refers to his studies opening up to him “a new Scene of Thought” (L: I, 13). He mentions reading

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many books of morality but coming to the view that the arguments of the classical theorists, like that of their natural philosophers, was “entirely hypothetical” paying no regard to “human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend” (L: I, 16). While in retrospect the germ of the enterprise that will produce the Treatise can be discerned here, that judgment owes at least something to hindsight. For his own part, Hume self-diagnosed that he needed a “more active Life” and with that intent, abetted by a recommendation, he resolved on becoming a merchant and in 1734 set off to Bristol. However, that was not a success and in that same year he departs for France and embarks on work that will result in the Treatise. In one of the more remarkable coincidences in the history of philosophy he spent the bulk of his time at La Flèche in Anjou, where in its Jesuit College Descartes had studied and the library of which Hume was to use. Hume returned to Britain in 1737 and began the process of getting the Treatise published, the first two parts (“books”) appearing in 1739, the third in 1740. He entertained high hopes that his work could, if taken up, “produce almost a total Alteration in Philosophy” (NL: 3). Despite the fact that he deliberately excised (“castrating . . . its noble Parts”) a section on miracles as likely to give “too much Offence,” its apparent failure to make an impression left him deeply

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disappointed. This disappointment stayed with him and in the Life he characterized its reception as falling “dead-born from the press” (E-Life: xxxiv), which, though perhaps the autobiography’s most famous phrase, is very likely appropriated from a line of verse by Alexander Pope (1956: 336). As we will see in Chapter 3 that was not, even contemporaneously, the book’s fate, nevertheless the sentiment does reflect the fact that never again did Hume publish a book of systematic philosophy. The two Enquiries (of Understanding in 1748, of Morals in 1751) were “essays” and were recyclings, with amendments, of the Treatise’s arguments and his other often-regarded philosophical masterpiece the Dialogues was only published posthumously and, as the title indicates, was nondemonstrative in design. When his own anonymous review (the Abstract) of his book failed to excite the reading public’s interest, he resolved to adopt the essay form as the means to engage that interest. Starting with the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1741, Hume began a career as a professional man of letters. Apart from a stint as a Librarian (part time), and (very briefly in 1745–6) a tutor/companion to the Marquis of Annandale, his only other occupations were as a “secretary” and Judge-Advocate to General St Clair in 1746, and again in 1748, and then, more substantially, two and half years (1763–6) working in

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the Embassy in Paris followed by a year as a London civil servant. Before discussing his literary career and intellectual context, it is worth mentioning, because of the light they throw on both of those, the failed attempt to secure chairs at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. University positions in eighteenth-century Scotland were the subject of patronage and the object of politicking (Emerson, 2008b). Hume was a candidate for the Edinburgh chair in Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy (moral philosophy) in 1744–5 at a time when control over the Town Council, which appointed professors, was the subject of factional fighting. Hume’s unsuccessful candidacy can be attributed, at least in part, to his being associated with the “losing side” on this occasion (Emerson, 1994). In addition to these extrinsic factors, Hume’s own philosophy was an intrinsically negative factor (Sher, 1990: 106). Hume was alert to this and wrote an anonymous pamphlet wherein he attempted to disarm his critics who were accusing him of skepticism and atheism and of “sapping the Foundations of Morality” (LG: 18). In one of his contemporary letters, repeating the language of the pamphlet, Hume attributed his failure to a “popular Clamour” deliberately raised against him “on account of Scepticism, Heterodoxy” (L: I, 59). In another letter he refers to

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his surprise that he was opposed by Francis Hutcheson (L: I, 58). Hutcheson was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow (and during the negotiation over the Edinburgh chair was himself offered the post). Hutcheson was not only a significant philosopher but is regarded as a major stimulus to the emergent Scottish Enlightenment (Scott, 1966; Campbell, 1982). He was one of the authors mentioned by Hume in the Introduction to the Treatise as “putting the science of man on a new footing” and Hume sent him the yet to be published Book 3. One of Hume’s most important letters is his reply to Hutcheson’s comments (now lost) (L: I, 32–4). Hume notes that Hutcheson has detected in his writing “a certain Lack of Warmth in the Cause of Virtue.” In articulating his own position Hume characterizes his own approach as that of an “anatomist,” while Hutcheson’s is that of a “painter” (a comparison he was to repeat in the concluding paragraph of the Treatise [T 3-3-6.6]). In the letter he goes on to declare Hutcheson’s reliance of “final causes” as “unphilosophical” and, as far as his own argument is concerned, “wide of my Purpose.” He repeats the key theme of Book 3 (which will occupy much of Chapter 2) that he never called justice “unnatural but only artificial” and, in a parting shot, says that in his discussion of virtue it was Cicero’s Offices not the Whole Duty of Man (a devotional text) on which he had his “Eye in all my Reasonings.”

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Hume prior to his failed Edinburgh application had published two volumes of essays subsequent to the Treatise. These mark his first bid to gain a wider readership or as he himself put it to act “as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominion of Learning to those of Conversation” (E-EW: 535). This remark was made in an essay published in the 1742 volume but it was later withdrawn. In fact he withdrew a further three from the dozen that comprised that edition, as well as three from the 1741 volume. One feature of the latter was a focus on political matters and I shall return to that aspect. By the time Hume’s name had been put forward for the Professorship of Logic at Glasgow University (1751–2) he had not only published the An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) (the First Enquiry), three other essays (including “of the Original Contract”), as well as a couple of pamphlets (True Account of Archibald Stewart (1747) and the Bellmen’s Petition [1751]) and, during the period of application, the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (the Second Enquiry) appeared. The Glasgow chair was held by Adam Smith but he was moving to that of Moral Philosophy thus creating the vacancy. In Glasgow appointments were made by the College Corporation but the Presbytery exercised a right of “enquiry into a candidate’s morals and orthodoxy” (Emerson, 1994: 15) and political patronage remained a crucial factor. Hume himself thought, perhaps naively in the light

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of the earlier application, he might have succeeded “in spite of the violent and solemn remonstrances of the clergy” had the major patron the Duke of Argyle been supportive (L: I, 164–5). Adam Smith, one of Hume’s supporters, wrote to a fellow supporter, William Cullen, admitting that while he “would prefer David Hume to any man for a colleague” yet “the public would not be of my opinion” and that opinion needs to be heeded (Smith, 1987: 5). Hume himself seems not to have been too discountenanced by the second failure since he was appointed the Advocates Librarian, almost immediately thereafter. This episode reveals something of the character of the Scottish Enlightenment. This “character” can, albeit in an imprecise manner, be seen to have a cultural and an intellectual dimension. Regarding the former, the Union of the Parliaments meant not so much that the Scots thereafter had little direct political power because in practice they were allowed, via patronage, considerable leeway for the governance of Scotland which was left in the hands of “managers.” Crucially, the Union also left the legal system and the Kirk (Church of Scotland) as distinct Scottish institutions. When coupled with the remarkable fact that Scotland possessed five Universities (compared to England’s two) and, fortified by the presence of many clubs and societies, this established a nexus of relations between leading political, legal,

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ecclesiastical, and academic figures. This nexus was united by its commitment to the Hanoverian succession, and thus resistance to the followers of the claims of the Stewart lines (Jacobites), who led a series of rebellions from Scotland before the final crushing defeat of “bonnie Prince Charlie’s” forces at Culloden in 1745. In addition to this shared political allegiance, these Scottish writers (the “literati”) were united over two other issues. In their guise as leaders of the so-called Moderate party in the Church of Scotland, they shared an antipathy to Catholicism (linked to Jacobitism) and also to the Calvinist legacy of the Kirk. Secondly, the literati were strong advocates of measures designed to lead to the (primarily economic) “improvement” of Scotland. Hume was a prominent member of these clubs, indeed he had a well-founded reputation for affable clubbability and he included among his friends prominent members of the Moderates like Hugh Blair and the historian William Robertson, who was both Principal of Edinburgh University and one-time moderator of the Church of Scotland. Although his public profile was too contentious for the University posts, Hume was no pariah as his Librarianship demonstrates. One of Hume’s particular roles was to act as a source of advice on literary style. It was a matter of some concern for the literati that they would appear to be different (suspiciously so) from the “polite”

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norms of Hanoverian England. Alexander Carlyle, one of the founders with Robertson of the Moderate movement, remarked in his Autobiography (1910: 543): [T]o every man bred in Scotland the English language was in some respects a foreign tongue, the precise value and force of whose words and phrases he did not understand and therefore was continually endeavouring to word his expressions by additional epithets or circumlocutions which made his writings appear both stiff and redundant.

There is plenty of supporting evidence for this selfconsciousness. This is most evident in a concern to eradicate “Scotticisms.” Hume himself published a list of these (see Basker, 1991) and it was said of him by the eccentric judge and scholar Lord Monboddo that he died confessing not his sins but his Scotticisms (Mossner, 1980: 606). His correspondence supplies many examples both of him receiving advice as well as giving it, for example, to Robertson (L: II, 194). These clubs and societies were also a focus for the concerns that permeated the intellectual dimension, as well as being the typical audience for essays of the sort Hume had begun to write (Finlay, 2007: 63). There were, of courses, differences between the literati but they subscribed in broad outline to a key Enlightenment theme that the achievements of Newton in

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natural science should be emulated in the social (or moral) sciences. As we will discuss at length in Chapter 2 this was the key inspiration for Hume’s “science of man.” What this Newtonian motif meant in practice was the endeavor to search for universal causes governing a range of social phenomena. This endeavor was coupled with others. In the words of another inspirational figure, Francis Bacon, a writer, who in Hume’s estimation “pointed out at a distance the road to true philosophy” (H: II, 112), “knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect” (Bacon, 1853: 383). Crucially this knowledge/power was not just for its own sake since, for Bacon, the “real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches” (Bacon, 1853: 416). This practical/utilitarian bent chimed in not only with the drive to “improvement” (the Hume estate at Ninewells was “improved”) (Emerson: 2008a) but also with Hume’s decision to write essays and his History, in as much as they were designed to influence contemporary thinking and policy. As mentioned above, his first two volumes of Essays had a political focus. Hume’s decision was not idiosyncratic: political essay-writing was very much in vogue. This literature was fervently partisan not only between the advocates of the two major political “parties,” the Whigs and the Tories but also within the

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former there was a further sharp division between Court and Country factions. Hume aspired to transcend partisanship; in Duncan Forbes’s influential interpretation he attempted to give the Hanoverian regime a proper intellectual foundation (Forbes, 1975: x, 136), to get both Whigs and Tories to recognize the character and challenges of the new economic world of commerce and move beyond outmoded dynastic and religious dogmas (Forbes, 1977: 43). Despite this aspiration, Hume’s writings were still attacked for partisanship. His frustration at this situation comes out, albeit with rhetorical flourish, in a letter of 1764, “some hate me because I am not a Tory, some because I am not a Whig, some because I am not a Christian and all because I am Scotsman” (L: I, 470). In these early volumes he included a couple of essays on “parties” and a couple more on Parliament. His basic aim was to distil opposed arguments and establish a judicious assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses. These essays were contributions to contemporary debate and indeed his work was incorporated within it, for example, his “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or a Republic” (1741) was reprinted in the Craftsman , an “opposition” weekly in the year of its publication (Forbes, 1975: 211). Unlike those essays that he labeled “frivolous” and dropped from his later editions, he

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retained these overtly political pieces. The one exception was “A Character of Sir Robert Walpole” published in the 1742 volume just before Walpole in fact resigned. This timing caused Hume first (1748) to turn it into a footnote to another essay (“That Politics may be reduced to a Science”) and then to omit entirely from 1770. This deliberate intent to comment on contemporary events has tended to get lost, as later commentators detach them from this context and treat them rather as theoretical disquisitions. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive endeavors and I will in Chapter 2 cite these essays without particular regard to the circumstances of their production. Perhaps the most telling illustration of this detachment is the best known of all Hume’s Essays, “Of the Original Contract” (1748). Standardly, and rightly, read as a near fatal blow to the pretensions of a version of contractarian political thinking it was designed by Hume as a companion to the essay “Of Passive Obedience.” As he explained in a contemporary letter, they were written to replace those discarded from the 1741–2 volumes and were destined to be “more instructive” with the Contract essay aimed against the “System of the Whigs” and the other against the “System of the Tories” (L: I, 112). The fact that the Contract essay was in this sense deliberately one-sided has not been deemed relevant in almost all the voluminous commentary that it as generated.

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The other significant collection of Essays was that titled Political Discourses (1752). In Hume’s own estimation this was the only one of his works that was “successful on first publication” (as we will note in Chapter 3 they had considerable success in France and Italy) (E-Life: xxxvi). The bulk of these were on “economic” topics like “Of Taxes” and “Of Money” and were self-consciously “intellectual” in that Hume prefaced the first essay in the collection (“Of Commerce”) with a defense of “philosophers” who attend to the “general course of things” (E-Com: 254). The arguments in this collection will feature prominently in Chapter 2. But, as with the “political” essays, these can be seen to possess a dual focus. Hence, for example, Hume’s articulation therein of a theory of money has been seen to prefigure much later speculation (Vickers, 1960; Wennerlind, 2005) and his defense of luxury has been identified as a significant defense of a commercial economy (Berry, 1994, 2008). However, the date of their publication and thrust of their argument has also been seen as a contribution to a lively debate in Scotland on the policy toward the Highlands after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion (Caffentzis, 2005; Emerson, 2008) and the role to be played by free trade (Hont, 1983, 2008). On his appointment as Advocates Librarian, Hume began in earnest his last major work, The History of Great Britain. Aside from the ever-present concern

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with generating income and fame, the aim in writing the History was to provide a less partial account than those currently available (see L: I, 170, 179). Whatever his intent, his readers did not see it that way— “I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation and even detestation” (E-Life: xxxvii). As he acknowledged in his correspondence it was perhaps a mistake to publish the first volumes separately (L: I, 218). The first (published 1754) dealt with the reigns of James I and Charles I, which because “he had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate” of the latter meant he was identified as Tory, the second (1756) dealt with the period from Charles’ death to 1688, which he himself thought would be judged more favorably by Whigs. He summed up his own position as his view “of things more conformable to Whig principles” while his “representation of persons to Tory prejudices” (L: I, 237). Perhaps because of its controversy the volumes sold well and Hume decided to extend its range (backward). The now titled History of England (covering the Tudor period) appeared in 1759 and a volume covering the time from the Saxons appeared in 1762. By the time of the later volumes Hume was able to earn £1,400 for the sale of the author’s rights to the publisher. He could gain what was a very substantial sum because of the great popularity of history as a genre—“I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation” (L: II, 230).

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For example, from extant records of borrowings from a library in Bristol between 1773 and 1784, Hume’s History was the fourth most borrowed book and Robertson’s Charles V the seventh most popular (Kaufman, 1969: 31). Hume’s only serious break from the life as a professional writer (there were, for example, six editions of his Essays after 1752) was a period in the mid-1760s spent working in the British Embassy in Paris followed by a year in London as a civil servant. In addition to being presented to the Royal Court at Versailles (L: I, 414), while in Paris he met many significant members of the French Enlightenment. His works were rapidly translated and, in many respects, he was lionized— “they consider me one of the greatest geniuses in the world” (L: I, 410). Hume for his part did consider some of the company “really great men” (L: I, 411), mentioning among those he liked best Diderot, D’alembert, Buffon, and Helvetius (L: I, 419). They saw in him a fellow ally against religious superstition and clerical presumption, though perhaps because that suited their prejudices (one equivocal anecdote has Hume declaring he has never met any atheists only to be told by his host, Baron d’Holbach, that all 18 of his fellow-diners were [Kors, 1976: 41–2]). His correspondence reveals little evidence of significant intellectual debate/argument but that it occurred seems inferable from the impact of his work

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(see Chapter 3). One exception is correspondence with Turgot, wherein he expresses some skepticism about Turgot’s hope of progress to perfection (L: II, 180 [Turgot, 1973: 41–59]). In this reservation Hume reflects a common theme that distinguishes the French from the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish variant had a far more circumspect of the view of the scope of reason to effect change, with a correspondent acknowledgment of the power that habit and custom play in human behavior plus a sensitivity to the supposed fact that much “progress” was the unintended consequence of more immediate concerns (Berry, 1997). Hume’s engagement with French intellectuals is overshadowed with his dealings with one individual— Jean Jacques Rousseau. These dealings started amicably but ended in bitter disagreement (Edmonds and Eidenow, 2000). They first came into contact in 1762 courtesy of a request from Hume’s most frequent French correspondent, the Comtesse de Bouffleurs, to help Rousseau because he was being persecuted for the unchristian components of his just published Emile. Hume wrote to Rousseau offering him assistance to move to Britain. In this letter Hume declared Rousseau to be “the Person I most revere, both for the Force of your Genius and the Greatness of your Mind” (L: I, 364). And while, when writing to Bouffleurs in the following year he comments on

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Rousseau’s literary “extravagance,” he still praises him and observes that Rousseau “with his usual dignity” had refused Hume’s offer (L: I, 372–3). However, in 1765 by which time they had met, Rousseau had accepted Hume’s offer. He came to England and, after much searching, Hume arranged accommodation for him in Derbyshire and obtained a pension from the king. Thereafter the relationship went rapidly downhill. Hume wrote lengthy justificatory letters to friends and acquaintances. Rousseau now becomes a “human creature” in whom “never was the so much Wickedness and Madness combined” (L: II, 80), a man given to “monstrous Ingratitude” who must pass as a “Lyar and Calumniator” (L: II, 54). Indeed, his letters of the period are full of contempt (although the Life omits all reference to the episode). What occasioned this vituperation was, in Hume’s judgment, Rousseau’s spurning of his purported assistance and accusing him of scheming to dishonor him (see L: II, 384). This disagreement had become public knowledge and to Hume’s ostensible discomfort (“I have never consented to anything with greater reluctance in my life” [L: II, 108]) his French friends published the correspondence, which was translated into English as a pamphlet (A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr Hume and Mr Rousseau [1765]). Hume died on August 25, 1776 at his house in the New Town of Edinburgh. His death was not sudden;

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in his autobiography he notes that in spring of 1775 he was “struck with a disorder in my bowels” which though at first thought innocuous he now observes that it has become “mortal and incurable” (the Life is dated April 18) (E-Life: xl). In several ways Hume’s attitude to his demise sums up his character. When it became obvious to himself, and others, that he was dying it became an object of morbid curiosity how this renownedly irreligious man would face up to his own mortality. The most infamous of these occasions is a visit to Hume by James Boswell who (in his own report) asked Hume whether the thought of his annihilation never gave him uneasiness. Hume’s unperturbed denial in fact perturbed Boswell (Fieser, 2003: I, 287; Baier, 2006). Two other accounts by Hume’s friends convey his sanguine temperament. William Cullen, writing to John Hunter, reports that a few days before his death that Hume, who had been reading the Roman essayist Lucian, imagined what plea he might make to stay on earth and stated “he had been very busily employed in making his countrymen wiser and particularly in delivering them from the Christian superstition but that he had not yet completed that great work” (Fieser, 2003: I, 292). Finally, Adam Smith, who had declined the offer to be Hume’s executor and more particularly to publish the Dialogues on Natural Religion, wrote to the publisher William Strahan of “our most excellent and

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never-to-be-forgotten friend.” Hume, he elaborated, was a man of “extreme gentleness” who expressed a “genuine effusion of good nature and good humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty and without even the slightest tincture of malignity,” and who exhibited a “gaiety of temper” that accompanied by “the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive.” In sum, wrote Smith, “upon the whole I have always considered him . . . as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit” (see L: II, 452).

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Hume’s Thought

Hume is not a conservative. By that I do not mean that he does not regard habit and custom, at both an individual and social level, as necessary and valuable nor that he is not critical of aspects of rationalistic individualism. Both of these are indeed key ingredients in his philosophy and I will explore them. But what I do mean, and here I am in sympathy with John B. Stewart’s argument (1992 and see also McArthur, 2007), is that his philosophy embraces his understanding of the findings and implications of modern science and, moreover, his conviction that philosophy consequently has to be put on a “new footing” results in a critique of traditional understandings of morals, economics, politics and, perhaps above all, religion. In as much as a new conception of freedom is a central ingredient in that critique then he is in a significant, if qualified way, a “liberal,” but it would be misleading to pin the label “libertarian” upon him. This discussion is organized into seven sections as follows: the first two sections deal with Hume’s philosophical framework, particularly with his notion of

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causation and its uniform applicability; Section C deals with his most important political argument, the artificiality of justice, leading in Section D to his discussion of government and key role played by custom and habit; Section E deals with his forthright account superstition and Section F with his defense of commercial society; the final section briefly assesses the nature and extent of Hume’s liberalism and presages the lengthier treatment of his place in conservative thought in Chapter 4.

A The Science of Man We can start at the beginning. In the Introduction to the Treatise, his first work, Hume declares it “evident” that all sciences relate more or less to human nature and they are thus “in some measure dependent on the science of man.” Using a striking military metaphor, he states that his aim is “instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier to march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature itself.” His conviction is that an explanation of the “principles of human nature,” or the formulation of “the science of man,” is the “only solid foundation” for a “compleat system of the sciences” (T Introd.4, 6). Among the sciences mentioned by Hume is politics, which, along with logic, morals, and criticism, has a “close and intimate” connection with human nature (T Introd.5) To give

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human nature such a central role was a commonplace but, as his metaphor suggests, Hume did not conceive his project as merely reproducing a received system but rather the “foundation” of his complete system was “almost entirely new.” The linchpin of this new system is the “science of man” and to a large extent this chapter is an elaboration of, and commentary upon, that key notion. There remains more initial instruction to be gained from the Introduction. The novel foundation, as identified in the subtitle to the Treatise, and repeated in the Introduction, is the experimental method. This method, he believes, has borne striking and decisive fruit in “natural philosophy.” Though no names are given, Newton is undeniably the inspiration. The likely explanation for this absence of an explicit reference is Hume’s concern to distance himself from the directly Providentialist use made of Newton by many of his contemporaries, as, for example, by George Turnbull in his exactly contemporaneous Principles of Moral Philosophy. A pen-portrait in the History nonetheless gives an accurate deception of Hume’s appreciation, where Newton is described as the “greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species” (H: III, 780). The Newtonian inspiration takes his cue from Newton himself, who in his Optics, remarked that if through pursuit of his method natural philosophy becomes perfected so, in like fashion, “the bounds of Moral

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Philosophy will be also enlarged” (1953: 179, Qn. 31). Hume conceives of himself, following in the footsteps of Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Butler, and unspecified others in applying this method to “moral subjects.” Since “moral” here derives etymologically from mores or social customs then we can reasonably paraphrase that Hume is set on what we would call “social science.” There are three crucial aspects of this science. First, it is observational—carefully and exactly attending to experience. Second, in an obvious echo of Newton, this should not be mere cataloguing but should attempt to trace these observational “experiments” to universal principles, that is, “explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes.” Moreover, and still in Newtonian vein, these attempts should not “go beyond experience” and this, importantly, imposes the self-denying ordinance that it is “presumptuous and chimerical” to attempt to “discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature” (T Introd.8). Third, Hume, in recognition that moral subjects are less amenable to experiment than natural ones, acknowledges that the cautious observations of human life need to be “judiciously collected and compar’d” but if that is done then certitude in its conclusions can be achieved and, with that, the science can be the most useful. (T Introd.10). The Treatise is divided into three books—Of the Understanding, Of the Passions (published together

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in 1739) and Of Morals (published in 1740). While the last of these is our primary concern the work is conceived as a unity and, true to that conception, the first two books bear significantly on his social philosophy. Nowhere is this significance more telling than in the analysis of causation that is a central theme of Book 1. Because of its crucial importance I start my account of Hume’s thought with it.

B Causation My guiding principle in what has necessarily has to be the briefest outline of his argument is how Hume’s analysis fits into, or informs, his social philosophy. Hume accepts Locke’s argument that the principle of innate ideas is false (T 1-3-14.10), and its consequence that “knowledge” must come from experience. Experience comes in the form of “perceptions” and Hume divides these into “impressions” (sensations, passions) and “ideas” (thoughts) (T 1-1-1.1). The latter, as their faint image, succeed the former (T 1-1-1.8); a principle that Hume identifies as the first he has established in “the science of human nature” (7). Simple ideas can be made complex by the imagination, so that the idea of a unicorn can be formed although, of course, one has never been perceived. However, the imagination is not fickle in its operations; Hume believes that it is guided by “some universal principles which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all

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times and places.” There is a “gentle force,” an “associating quality,” whereby simple ideas regularly fall into complex ones (T 1-1-4.1). Unlike Locke (1854: I, 531–41), Hume treats the “association of ideas” positively, indeed he regards this as one of his major discoveries (TA 35). There are three principles of association—resemblance, contiguity of time and place, and cause and effect (T 1-1-4.1). While strictly a priori (i.e. outside experience) “anything may be the cause of anything” (T 1-4-5.32), the world appears in experience as orderly and not capricious; it exhibits regularity as one set of causes is consistently and persistently followed by one set of effects. Accordingly it is to experience that this order and regularity must be traced. In summary, all those objects, of which we call the one cause and the other effect consider’d in themselves are as distinct and separate from each other as any two things in nature, nor can we ever, by the most accurate survey of them, infer the existence of one from that of the other. ’Tis only from experience and observation of their constant union that we are able to form this inference; and even after all, the inference is nothing but the effects of custom on the imagination. (T 2-31.16 cf. T1-3-8.12) Hume’s most famous example is the impact of a moving billiard ball upon a stationary one (TA 9). Upon

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impact the latter ball moves and this seems an obvious case of causation. But since only a sequence of movements of balls is perceived why is it “obvious” that this is indeed a causal sequence? Hume analyzes the process and identifies three elements—contiguity (the first ball is observed to hit the second), priority (the second was static until seen to be hit by the first and then it was observed to move) and “constant union” or conjunction. There is nothing else. There is no other source of knowledge about causation available to us; in particular (recall the first of the three aspects of the science of man) we can know nothing of any supposed causal power or force (TA 26 cf. U 7.21). Of the three elements Hume identifies the third is crucial, recall now the third aspect of the science—the need to collect and compare. It is only because every time we have perceived a collision of balls the same sequence occurred that we can properly say the movement of the second ball has been caused by the impact of the first. The first two elements alone are insufficient—I might put a cross on my ballot paper in a voting booth and the booth catches fire. As a discrete, one-off sequence this is akin to the billiard balls; it is, however, not causal because each time I vote the booth does not blaze, there is no constancy in the conjunction. What this means for Hume is that we attribute causal relations because we habitually associate phenomena.

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We are “determined by custom” (TA 15) to expect or believe that the second ball’s movement was caused by the impact upon it of the first ball. We expect, that is to say, that “like objects placed in like circumstances will always produce like effects” (T 1-3-8.14). In virtue of this constancy we can predict that the second static ball will move when hit by the first ball in motion. There is an evident programmatic aspect implicit here; recall once more that the science of man is of “superior utility” (T Introd.10). If we know/can predict that a set of effects will follow from a certain set of causes then we can act accordingly—I want hot water therefore I have to heat it. (Recollect from Chapter 1 Bacon’s dictum that “knowledge of causes is power.”) The prediction is the product of our belief that “nature will continue uniformly the same” (TA 13). Here ultimately lies the order we experience; an order that is “nothing but the effects of custom on imagination.” So it is that Hume can claim that custom is the “guide of human life” and “the cement of the universe” (TA 16, 35). (The extent to which these claims underwrite a conservative reading of Hume’s philosophy will be taken up later.) These principles of causation apply universally. They are not restricted to “natural” phenomena like ballistics; they also apply to the workings of the mind and to the interactions of social life. This extension is indeed Hume’s basic purpose in the Treatise. Perhaps the most important consequence of Hume’s commitment to a

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“science of man” is the conviction that causal analysis must apply to “moral subjects.” The essence of Hume’s position can be best captured in one of his examples (one he uses on two separate occasions, which strongly suggests that he himself thought it telling). The example is a case where “natural and moral evidence cement together” such that they are “of the same nature and deriv’d from the same principles” (T 2-31.17, U 8.19). He presents the predicament of a prisoner in jail. The individual has “neither money nor interest” and thus escape is impossible due as equally to the “obstinacy of the gaoler” as it is to the “walls and bars with which he is surrounded.” Experience has taught that human physical strength cannot destroy stone walls (natural evidence, which is why prisons are constructed of stone not paper) and that deprived of the means to bribe jailers the latters’ interests are bound to their custodial role (moral evidence). In both cases a series of constant conjunctions prevails. It is the presence of this constancy that enables Hume to believe that “moral subjects” are amenable to causal explanation and it is this explanation that the “science of man” is primed to provide. Hume notes how this belief runs through the whole of social life in the conduct of war, commerce, economy, and so on not excluding politics, where, for example, he cites a prince “who imposes a tax upon his subjects expects their compliance” (T 2-3-1.15). I will pick up

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the reference to “expectation” later but first want to explore a significant consequence of this position, namely, a commitment to “determinism.” This comes out clearly in his treatment of “liberty and necessity” in both the Treatise and First Enquiry. The key is a commitment to the uniformity of human nature. The latter text supplies perhaps the clearest expression. He asserts that “it is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same in its principles and operations” so that it now follows that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. (U 8.7)

Hume is quite explicit that these “materials” provided by the historical record are “collections of experiments” that enable the “moral philosopher” to fix “the principles of his science” just like “the natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants [etc.] . . . by the experiments which he forms concerning them.” These “principles” are the “regular springs”

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of human behavior and these themselves are generically the “passions.” In this passage he specifically identifies ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, and public spirit. These operate regardless of particular social context (Hume adopts what I elsewhere have labeled a “non-contextualist” theory [Berry, 1982, 1986]). Of course there are differences and variations but the comprehension of these is still founded on knowledge of constant uniformity. In a metaphor employed in “A Dialogue,” included within the Second Enquiry, he says that the difference in the courses of the Rhine and Rhone rivers is caused by the different inclinations of the ground but both rivers have their source in the same mountains and their current is actuated by the same principle of gravity (MD 26). By the same token, all human behavior, even if it has a “local” character, is explicable because it is governed by regular springs that have uniform effects. This is why there can be a science of human nature (Man); human behavior necessarily exhibits certain noncontextual uniformities. Humans do not act or behave in such a way that they can only be understood parochially. It would be contrary to the first Newtonian rule of philosophizing if their local behavior could not be subsumed under, and explained by, a few simple causes but had, rather, to be accounted for in its own strictly noncomparable terms, where (as he puts it)

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“every experiment” was “irregular and anonymous” (U 8.9). It is important to note that this argument is not just a methodological rule of thumb or necessary presupposition to make any historical knowledge possible (Walsh, 1975; Pompa, 1990); it is also a normative or judgmental yardstick. An example of that dimension is when he says of a traveler’s report that he had visited a country where the inhabitants knew nothing of “avarice, ambition or revenge” and knew “no pleasure but friendship, generosity and public spirit” that “we should immediately” judge the report false as we would if it talked of seeing centaurs and dragons (M 8.8). Causation thus applies universally and, strictly speaking, there are no “chance” events, for these are only the effect of “secret and conceal’d causes” (T 1-312.1). But Hume nonetheless distinguishes between two sorts of causation—physical and moral. This is most openly done in his essay “Of National Characters” (1748). This essay is essentially a polemic. Its argumentative thrust is that moral causes are the effective explanation for national character, while physical causes fail in that task. The latter he defines as those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone of the body and giving a particular complexion,

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which, though reflection and reason may sometimes overcome it, will yet prevail among the generality of mankind, and have an influence on their manners. (E-NC: 198)

He defines moral causes as “all circumstances which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us” (E-NC: 198). As with the term “moral subjects,” “moral” here thus means pertaining to customs. If we compare the definitions, we can identify where the crucial difference lies. Physical causes work “insensibly” on the “temper” by way of the “body”; hence in a later essay (1752) (E-PAN: 378–9) he can also call physiological aging and disease physical causes. Moral causes work on the “mind” as a “motive” by making a set of manners “habitual.” Though the difference is crucial it is one of degree, not kind, a difference between hard and soft determinism (Berry, 1997: chapter 4). The former is most famously associated with Montesquieu’s analysis in De l’Esprit des Lois (1748). Physical causation operates directly on the body, as a mere automatic reflex, as when in Montesquieu’s experiment, the fibers on a sheep’s tongue contract in response to being frozen (1961: I, 241). Hume’s support for moral causes is an expression of “soft” determinism, because it operates through the “mind” and allows for flexible response. But it is still

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deterministic, because the way the various circumstances that constitute moral causes operate is to establish a set of motives or reasons that “render a peculiar set of manners habitual” or, as he says explicitly in the next paragraph, “the manners of individuals are frequently determined by these [moral] causes” (E-NC: 198, my emphasis). This last point should not be misunderstood. For all the weight Hume attaches to the forces of socialization (see below), he never claims that any particular individual cannot escape or be exceptional (he gives the poet Homer as an example [E-AS: 114]). But such exceptions are allowed for by Hume when he inserts the adverb “frequently” before “determined” in the quotation above. Nonetheless there is a persistent strand of anti-individualism in his thought. This comes out in, for example, his explanation for social change— like the rise of the commons, the establishment of liberty or growth of commerce (see Section F). If we return to these moral causes we find Hume identifies the following: “nature of government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours” (E-NC: 198). Of these, he invokes “government” most frequently. Generally, differences of manners track differences in government such as, pertinently, the absence of liberal arts in an oppressive government (E-AS: 115). The second most

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common factor is close communication, with Jews given as an example (E-NC: 205). In practice these two commonest factors are closely allied. One of the reasons why government is so causally effective is that when people are politically united, they interact frequently over matters such as government itself, defense, and commerce. This frequency or repetitiveness, abetted by the same language, means a people “must acquire a resemblance in their manners” (E-NC: 203, my emphasis). These manners, or “the habits and way of living of the people” (E-Int: 298 cf E-Mon: 290, 294), will differ but, as we have seen, not in so profound a way that would preclude scientific explanation, for if you want to know “the sentiments, inclinations and course of life of the Greek and Romans” then you can study with confidence (“you cannot be much mistaken”) the French and English (M 8.7). The explanation for the difference is put down to socialization because it is “the great force of custom and education which mould[s] the human mind from its infancy and form[s] it into a fixed and established character” (U 8.11). The reference to “infancy” recurs in “Of National Characters” where he claims (glossing moral causation) “whatever it be that forms the manners of one generation, the next must imbibe a deeper tincture of the same dye; men being more susceptible of all impressions during infancy, and retaining these

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impressions as long as they remain in the world” (E-NC: 203). Underpinning this is a philosophical physiology, according to which the minds of children are “tender,” so that “customs and habits” are able to “fashion them by degrees” for social life (T 3-2-2.4) (Berry, 2006: 304). It is a central tenet of Hume’s social philosophy that humans do indeed have to be “fashioned” for society. I now turn to that philosophy.

C Justice i The artificiality of justice

The crux of Hume’s argument is that justice is an artificial virtue. From Plato through to the great systems of Natural Law justice had been thought to be not a matter of artifice or convention but “natural”— it was part of human nature to act justly. Hume, however, is careful to spell out what it is that he is affirming and what it is that he is here denying. He does not dispute that “no principle of the human mind is more natural than a sense of virtue” and, given Hume regards justice as a virtue, then it partakes of that “naturalness.” He also observes that since humans are an “inventive species” then where an invention is “obvious and absolutely necessary” then it can be treated as “natural as any thing that proceeds immediately from original principles.” This indeed is

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exactly what Hume does want to claim. He goes further. Though justice is artificial it is not “arbitrary” and, on that basis, he even declares that it is not improper to call the rules of justice “laws of nature, if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species” (T 3-2-1.19). A significant clue to the meaning of artifice is supplied by the way Hume sets up his discussion. He opens by comparing the situation of humans to that of other animals: Of all the animals . . . there is none towards whom nature seems at first sight to have exercis’d more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving of these necessities. In other creatures these two particulars generally compensate each other. (T 3-2-2.2)

He then proceeds to elaborate upon this “compensation” with references to lions, sheep, and oxen and, in contrast, he reaffirms that an individual human experiences “in its greatest perfection” an “unnatural conjunction of infirmity and necessity” (T 3-2-2.2). To deal with this conjunction humans need society. The root of this need (“the first and original principle of human society”) is “the natural appetite between the sexes” (T 3-2-2.4). Clearly there is nothing uniquely human

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in the possession of this “appetite” but, for Hume, in implicit contrast to the natural facts about sheep and other animals, the “circumstances of human nature,” in particular the selfishness in “our natural temper,” make its operation insufficient. This is compounded by the incommodiousness of “outward circumstances” with the consequence that human social/group life is naturally unstable. This instability thus arises “necessarily” out of the concurrence of two facts: it is a uniform fact of human nature that humans have only a “limited” or “confin’d generosity” and that, in fact, “external objects” are scarce relative to the desire for them (T 3-2-2.16). (These constitute what the twentieth century political philosopher, John Rawls [1972], in an explicit acknowledgement of Hume, calls the “circumstances of justice.”) The only remedy to this instability is an artificially or conventionally induced stability. This is what justice provides. Hume is emphatic: “without justice society must immediately dissolve” (T 3-2-2.22 cf. M 3.38). Not being provided by nature with ready-made solutions, and suffering from that “unnatural conjunction of infirmity and necessity,” humans themselves have had to come up with their own answers in order to make social life possible (T 3-2-6.1). They have had to “invent” a solution. Justice is the outcome but since it arises out of the ineluctable juxtaposition of scarcity and limited

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generosity then it is inseparable from the human species. Hume’s account of how this inventive construction of an artificial remedy takes place is sketchy. Once humans develop beyond familial groupings (bonded by sexual appetite and more particularly by parental affection) they realize (“become sensible of”) the necessity to cooperate to remedy their natural disadvantages (T 3-2-2.9) or what Hume calls (employing a phrase of Locke’s [1963]) “inconveniencies” (T 3-22.3). He itemizes three: insufficient individual capacity or power to meet needs, inability to specialize and thus be forced to “make do” when meeting the needs and basic vulnerability to any small change of fortune. “Society” is the remedy because it provides respectively “additional force, ability and security.” For “society” to accomplish this we know that humans have to invent justice. Hume must account for this in a way consonant with the science of man; most pointedly it must be in line with the “naturalism” with which his account has proceeded thus far. Hence there is no room for supernatural (divine) intervention—for Hume that would be “arbitrary.” What he comes up with is that humans contrive the remedy by restraining their passions (their original inclinations) by artfully creating conventions that are themselves the invention of their passions (T 3-2-2.9, T 3-2-6.1). In this way, as we shall see, the artifice of

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property establishes stability of possession by restraining “the heedless and impetuous movement” of the passion to acquire goods for ourselves (family and friends) but is itself the “alteration” of the “direction” of that passion (T 3-2-2.13; T 3-2-5.9). Humans from their “early education in society” have “observ’d” the disadvantages that come from instability of possessions (T 3-2-2.9) and “on the least reflection” it is “evident” that the “passion is much better satisfy’d by its restraint than by its liberty” (T 3-2-2.13). Clearly this is not in any strict sense an “observation.” What Hume has done is make inferences from his “scientific” analysis of human nature (human motives or passions). At best this is susceptible to a social Darwinian explanation. Those groups that developed the appropriate remedial conventions were more successful and survived to pass them on, through socialization, to their young. In what then, for Hume, does justice consist? It comprises rules. Hume identifies three —stability of possession, its transfer by consent and promise-keeping (T 3-2-6.1). Before turning, in the next subsection, to the content of these rules, we need to heed Hume’s careful account of how these rules/agreements/conventions emerged. (He needs to do this in part because, as we shall see, he is savagely critical of Contract theory.) The conventions of justice are the effect of mutual agreement which when known to the

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participants “produce[s] a suitable resolution and behaviour.” Hume provides the example of “two men who pull the oars of a boat do it by agreement or convention though they have never given promises to each other.” He then generalizes this principle to affirm that it is through the operation of this same principle that “gradually” and “by slow progression” languages are formed and gold becomes the measure of exchange (T 3-2-2.10). These rules have two important characteristics and it is here where the link between Hume’s analysis of justice and commercial society is forged (see Section F). These rules are both general and inflexible. We can see here a clear connection between Hume’s epistemology and his political and moral philosophy. The very coherence of the world (the cement of the universe) depended upon extending through habit the experience of one case to another. General rules are formed on the basis of expecting past occurrences to continue (T 2-2-5.13). They are indispensable; indeed Hume regards it as a truth about human nature that we “are mightily addicted to general rules” (T 3-2-9.3). As we have seen, in the case of justice these rules are artificial. Humans impose them upon themselves to establish order but to attain that end necessitates “strict observance” of the three “laws” (T 3-2-6.1); they need to be “unchangeable by spite and favour,

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and by particular views of private or public interest” (T 3-2-6.9). Justice has to be “strict”; rules have to be unchangeable or inflexible so that there can be predictability and thence social coherence. When that is established then individuals can act “in expectation that others are to perform the like” (T 3-2-2.22). Such expectations, built up through “repeated experience,” are self-supporting. This was how languages and money came to be established because this experience assures us still more that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct. And ’tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. (T 3-2-2.10, my emphases)

More particularly, the rules of justice have to be inflexible because they provide the background stability to enable this “confidence” to grow and these “expectations” to be entertained. And this inflexibility is necessary because the temptation to relax the rules is strong. He cites the case of miser who justly receives a great fortune. He admits that a “single act” of justice like this may “in itself be prejudicial to society” (the money could have done more good elsewhere) but, nonetheless, the “whole plan or scheme” is “absolutely requisite” (T 3-2-2.22). If an exception is made in one case, if the rules are made flexible or made to forfeit their generality, then justice in the

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form of expectations that “everyone will perform the like” will break down. Hume counsels against evaluating single transactions as unjust if they seem clearly contrary to the public interest (as when a miser justly inherits a fortune). On the contrary what needs to be considered is the “general point of view,” from which perspective that “whole plan or scheme” can be appreciated (T 3-2-2.22). In an unremarkable way this gives a “conservative” cast to Hume’s thought. If social interactions depend on reliable expectations and associated beliefs then presumptively they should be conserved given that the effect of flexibility is to undermine those foundations. Moreover, these are genuinely foundations such that it is dangerous to the superstructure to meddle with them—to intervene in an attempt ameliorate is too risky (better to let the miser inherit).

ii The rules of justice

I now turn to look at the rules of justice themselves. Since two of the three rules relate to property—its stability and transfer—I will focus first on that relation, and take up the third rule about promises in the context of Hume’s move to the key institution of government. One of the commonest complaints of Hume’s account of justice is that he confines it too narrowly to questions of property (Harrison, 1981). To explain,

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and account for, his position we need to return to his naturalism, his identification of the human predicament. Hume distinguishes three species of human “goods”—“internal satisfaction of our mind, the external advantages of our body and the enjoyment of such possessions as we have acquir’d by our industry and good fortune” (T 3-2-2.7). He then asserts that we are “perfectly secure in the enjoyment” of the first of these. Hume is no fan of the Stoics but this is consistent with their conviction that humans are independent, capable of “apathy” or being unperturbed by external events. It also accords with what is now thought of as a key assumption in the basic liberal tenet of toleration, namely, “inward” belief cannot be coerced no matter what external pressure is exercised to ensure “outward” compliance. With the respect to the second type of “goods,” Hume declares that while these advantages may well be “ravish’d from us,” they are of no advantage to the perpetrator. It is not obvious that being enslaved and forced to work manually does not benefit a conqueror who keeps us alive in order to toil on his behalf. Of course, another cannot perform tasks that only the agent can execute (I might use your “external advantage” to hold physically the handkerchief but you can’t sneeze for me). This only leaves the third category. It is possessions that are “both expos’d to the violence of others and may be transferr’d without suffering any loss or alteration” (T 3-2-2.7).

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From this fact, when coupled with insufficiency of supply, it follows for Hume, that stabilizing possession of these goods is “the chief advantage of society,” which is to say that the artifice of justice remedies the inconvenience of unstable possession. What the rules of justice do is transmute possession into property. This point is made the first time Hume refers to “property” in the Treatise, where in Book II he adumbrates the later argument by defining it as “such a relation betwixt a person and an object as permits him, but forbids any other, the free use and possession of it, without violating the laws of justice and moral equity” (T 2-1-10.1). In Book III, property is straightforwardly identified as “nothing but those goods whose constant possession is establish’d by the laws of society; that is the laws of justice” (T 3-2-2.11). In the same paragraph, he also picks up the idea of property as a relation—“man’s property is some object related to him” (a relation which on occasion he typifies as a species of causation [T 3-2-2.7, T 3-2-3.7, DP: 14]). He then glosses this by adding “this relation is not natural but moral and founded on justice.” The gloss is revealing. “Moral” here still bears the generic sense of customary but it also picks out the conventional dimension to the habitual. Much as habits can constitute a “second nature” they are still different from “first nature” or original principles. This means that this contrast between natural as original and

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moral as conventional is a restatement of the artificiality of the relation (as conveyed, for example, in the concept of a “moral person” as a legal artifact). All of this is captured by Hume’s firm declaration (still within this same paragraph) that the idea of property (and similarly right and obligation) is unintelligible without understanding the idea of justice. In the literal sense of the word it is “preposterous” to “imagine we can have any idea of property without fully comprehending the nature of justice” since “the origin of justice explains that of property.” By making property (and right) artificial Hume is deliberately distancing himself from the Natural Law/Lockean idea of a natural right to property. The important implication of this is that Hume is not a “rights-based” liberal nor a fortiori a similarly grounded libertarian like Nozick (1974). “Rights” do not inhere as some natural property of persons that, as such, have normative superiority, or establish an evaluative yardstick against which, social institutions can/should be measured. The explanation as to why he distances himself from that position is his scientific intent. He has traced the necessity of justice to the imperative to contrive stability in human intercourse because of the “unnatural conjunction” of partiality and scarcity (T 3-2-2.2). Humans do not possess—nature has not provided them with—any “peculiar original principles” to sustain society. To subscribe to what he calls

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the “the vulgar definition of justice” namely, giving every one his due (T 3-2-6.1) is to endorse this view of natural provision. But the experiments in the science of man produce a different outcome. Humans are naturally moved by their passions to the preclusion of their satisfaction but by artifice they restrain these passions by establishing the rules of justice so that they may be satisfied. To subscribe to natural provision is to undermine that restraint. The vulgar account effectively makes justice flexible and thereby destroys its “public utility” (T 3-2-6.8), its ability to ensure stability. In an elaboration of this, Hume returns to the connection between property and justice. He repeats his argument that property is an artificial/moral and not a natural relation. If, however, property is conceived of as a “natural right,” as “antecedent, and independent” of justice, as another ingredient of a “natural morality,” then, for Hume, it would “produce an infinite confusion in human society” (T 3-2-6.9). To illustrate this we can return to the example of the miser. For Hume the only relevant consideration is “strict justice” but for Francis Hutcheson, for example, the “moral sense” would approve the “generosity of a worthy man” over the “parsimony of a miser,” that is, our “natural morality” would approve the former’s action (Hutcheson, 1994: 72). This imports a possible contingency for, though we may believe “property”

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should in general be respected, nevertheless we are always “naturally” liable to make an “exception” in this or that case. This indeterminate exceptionalism means that it is flexibility that is “natural,” a finding that Hume takes as a proof that the very inflexibility of justice reveals its source in artifice. To adopt the expansive vulgar definition of justice (which in fact was the definition in not only Greek but also Christian and Natural Law ethics) is to make it, in effect, the code of conduct suffusing all human relationships. But this is exactly the expansive looseness that the science of man is policing. This definition goes beyond experience because it relies on the “chimerical” presumption that it embodies the “ultimate original principles of human nature” (T Introd.8). To claim it is “obvious” that the miser should not inherit is to assert there is some “natural beauty” in property relations (T 3-2-6.4). For Hume this claim creates confusion in the further sense that it imports into a warranted and self-sufficient account of how humans have constructed a viable social life an unwarranted recourse to metaphysical first principles or theology. (Again Hutcheson can be cited as relevant witness, since he had remarked that the highest branch of justice was piety toward God [Hutcheson, 2007: 100]). As we will observe, for Hume religion, too, has its origin in human-all-toohuman passions and has no preemptive normative

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force. Once, therefore, we stray beyond the narrow understanding of justice with its restricted focus on property and give it a broader meaning then we get lost in the intractable, and effectively pointless, debates over first or original principles (Krause, 2004).

iii The virtuousness of justice

There remains an outstanding question. We have seen why Hume thinks justice necessary but he has to explain why it is also “virtuous.” That explanation is needed not only because that is what observation of common life reveals but also because, as he admits, it was established out of self-interest and that source would seem far-removed from “virtue” (T 3-2-2.24). (The same applies to promise-keeping since that practice too originated in self-interested commerce [T 3-2-5.8].) As a preliminary we need to say something briefly about his moral philosophy. For Hume morality is “more properly felt than judg’d of” (T 3-2-1.1), a proposition that stems definitionally from his basic axioms. Given that all perceptions are either impressions or ideas then if moral perceptions are not ideas (the province of reason) they must be a feature of sentiment. He then claims that “every man’s experience must convince us” that the impression arising

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from virtue is “agreeable” or pleasurable while that from vice is “uneasy” or painful (T 3-2-1.2 cf. T 2-39.8, T 2-1-2.4). While the agreeable impression that “arises from” virtue is a given of human nature (an ultimate fact in the science of man that cannot be explained [T Introd.8]) there is nothing similarly given about what gives rise to virtue. Simply to state that all virtues originate in “nature” is too imprecise (T 3-1-2.7). More than that it is actually false if “natural” is taken to mean the operations of physiological/physical causes (like temperature on a sheep’s tongue). Crucially for Hume much of human life is necessarily governed not by knee-jerk reactions but by conventions, rules or artifices and these are inventions or learned responses and, of course, the most important of these is justice. To repeat, justice is a necessary invention generated by the facts that humans possess only a “confin’d generosity” and are confronted with scarce resources. Hume is here openly accepting that universal benevolence which, for Francis Hutcheson, was the summit of moral goodness (1994: 88–9,100) is contrary to these facts. Yet Hume does not accept Hobbes’ argument (1991: chapter 6) that humans are only self-interested and in many passages he stresses human sociality and its importance (T 2-2-4.4, T 2-25.15). The support for this is “common experience”

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since if that is consulted then the finding is that “kind affections” outweigh the selfish (T 3-2-2.5). Such kind affections as meekness, beneficence, charity, generosity, clemency, and the like are both natural and social virtues (T 3-3-1.11 cf. M 5.3; E-OC: 479). The undeniable evidence of their existence means that Hume is forthright in dismissing the Hobbes’ (and Mandeville’s [1988]) view that all moral distinctions are the product of the “artifice of politicians” (M 5.3, T 3-3-1.1, T 3-2-2.25). Yet all this granted these social virtues alone cannot sustain society. For that task justice and other artifices are needed. The closeness of social relationships, characteristic of the early stages of social development, made it possible to identify directly with others. The consequence of this proximity was that I could see that my restraint (my observation of the rules of justice) was reciprocated to all our benefit. This circumstance “pleases” and we thus label this restraint/justice virtuous. But once society has become more complex this direct identification with others is lost. It follows from this that (say) the burglary of a stranger’s house is of no material interest to me. Nevertheless the facts are that this burglary still displeases and we still therefore say it is an injustice. But as matters now stand it is hard to see why. Displeasure is a feeling but that stranger as a stranger is someone to whom I am indifferent. There

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has to be a means whereby the stranger’s fate engages my sentiments. Hume supplies that “means” through the principle of “sympathy.” Hume first introduces “sympathy” in Book II of the Treatise where it has a precise, “technical” meaning as the process whereby an “idea” is converted into an “impression” (the difference between these being one of degree not kind [T 1-1-1.1]). It is, as Hume affirms, “an object of the plainest experience” that the “idea” in our minds of another’s passions is “converted into the very impressions” that those passions represent (T 2-1-11.8). We now feel as they do. In line with this, the idea we form of the stranger’s “unease” at being burgled is by sympathy converted into our “partaking” of that unease. And since “every thing which gives uneasiness in human actions upon the general survey is call’d Vice” then we label the burglary an injustice (T 3-2-2.24). Correspondingly all actions which uphold the rules of justice give satisfaction and are labeled virtuous. As Hume puts it, sympathy takes us “out of ourselves” so that the pleasure or uneasiness of others is also felt (T 3-3-1.11). In this way sympathy “produces our sentiment of morals” in all the artificial virtues (T 3-3-1.10 my emphasis). There is no need to have recourse to a direct moral sense (as Hutcheson had done) to identify the virtue of justice. For sympathy to achieve this considerable feat it also means that it has

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to be a “very powerful principle of human nature” (T 3-3-6.1, T 3-3-1.10). As a principle of human nature it will be constant and uniform in operation (see above). This is why we are justified (as “in any other matter of fact” [T 2-1-11.8]) in causally inferring from the observation of another’s behavior that they are experiencing certain passions (the burgled stranger’s anger and grief, for example). Though Hume allows that sympathy is responsible for the uniformity in the “humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation” and this resemblance is more significant in forming national character than “soil and climate (T 2-1-11.2; E-NC) it is not restricted since the principles of the science of man apply universally; it is a matter of degrees of facility not possibility.

D Government, Legitimacy, and Custom The same processes that produce the necessity for justice also account for the need for government. As we will see there is a strong polemical element embedded within his account. i The need for and role of government

As we will discuss below in subsection iii, for all the weight that Hume’s social theory attaches to custom and habit as socializing individuals into a way of

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living, it is evident that there still remains a formal need for the enforcement of just conduct. Government meets that need. In his discussion of the origin of government in the Treatise Hume declares it to be a “quality of human nature” to prefer the contiguous to the remote (T 3-2-7.2). This is a “dangerous” quality because it makes humans prefer trivial “present advantage” to the more distant maintenance of justice. However, in the now familiar way, this dangerous “infirmity” of human nature becomes a remedy to itself (T 3-2-7.5) as humans create the artificial institution of magistracy. By the means of this artifice the observance of justice is made the “immediate interest” of a few who “inforce the dictates of equity thro’ the whole society.” These “few” are claimed to be “satisfy’d with their present condition” (T 3-2-7.6) and being “indifferent to the greatest part of society” can act equitably (T 3-2-7.7). While in one of his late essays he seemingly acknowledges the inherent complacency of that view by remarking that governors may “often” be “led astray by private passions”; yet, nonetheless, they are still said to have a “visible interest in the impartial administration of justice” (E-OG: 39). By this administration (enforcement), security is enhanced and constructive interactions can ensue. This process Hume will greatly enlarge upon in his later work as he charts the growth of commerce and civilization (see Section G). Hume also recognizes

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that government is particularly placed so that it can have an “immediate interest in the interest of any considerable part of their subjects” and thus under its “care” “bridges are built; harbours open’d; ramparts rais’d; canals form’d; fleets equipp’d; and armies disciplin’d” (T 3-2-7.8). In effect, Hume is recognizing the role played by government in ensuring the provision of “public goods.” The need for government, its utility, or promotion of the common good, is thus obvious but, importantly, it does not follow that it was deliberately set up with great forethought. In the Treatise he observes that the laws of justice themselves, though in the public interest, were not “intended for that purpose by the inventors,” for their interest was for themselves (their “self-love” as Hume calls it) (T 3-2-6.6). This is a foreshadowing of Smith’s “invisible hand” (Smith, 1981: 456) and this same insight recurs when the Treatise’s abstract formal treatment is subject to more concrete investigation in his later Essays. There Hume remarks what while the emergence of government looks “certain and inevitable” it actually commences “more casually and imperfectly.” Now appealing more openly to evidence that warfare is endemic in “savage tribes” he conjectures that its “long continuance” at that time gave to the strongest and most prudent a leadership role (E-OG: 40). The people being “enured” to their submission come to accept the leader’s decisions as

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an arbiter during peace-time disputes. It was in this way, as an unintended consequence, that government commences; it “cannot be expected that men should beforehand be able to discover them [principles of government] or foresee their operation” (E-OG: 39). This is in outline exactly the case that Hume that drawn upon to account for the emergence of conventions to govern property, money, and language. Once initiated these conventions become self-supporting as (to requote) “the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct.” I obey because you obey (and vice versa) and the beneficial effect of obedience gives us an interest in obeying. There is a polemical dimension to this discussion. This awareness of unintended consequences is central to Hume’s downgrading of “reason,” in the sense of treating appeals to rationality as a motivational explanation for social institutions. This downgrading is frequently identified as a hallmark of “conservative” thinking in so far as it juxtaposes in Edmund Burke’s phrase the individual’s “private stock” of reason to the “bank and capital of nation and ages” and warns of the calamities that follow from neglecting the latter and acting on the former (1987: 76). The most celebrated expression of this in Hume’s political writing occurs in this context as he undercuts the theory of the “original contract,” especially

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in its Lockean form (see Buckle and Castiglione [1991]). Locke had claimed that in order to understand the “true, extent and end” of civil power it was necessary to identify its origins (1963: II, §1). This typical claim in fact goes a long way to explaining why the dominant reference is to an “original” contract.

ii The critique of contract

Hume explicitly develops a two-pronged attack—historical and philosophical. The heart of the “philosophy” of contract was a promise by the ruler that he would govern equitably in exchange for obedience and reciprocally a promise by the subjects that they would obey in exchange for fair stable rule. Hume’s philosophical rejection turns on a distinction in moral duties (E-OC: 479–80). One category of duties emanates directly from a “natural instinct or immediate propensity” and operates independently of any ideas of obligation or utility. His examples are love of children, gratitude to benefactors and pity to the unfortunate. When humans reflect on the social advantages of these propensities they “pay them the just tribute of moral approbation and esteem.” The duties in the other category do not emanate immediately from instinct; they operate only after reflection upon their necessity for social intercourse.

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His examples here are justice, fidelity and, crucially for the present argument, allegiance. Although Hume no longer calls these “artificial” virtues the basic argument is the same as that spelt out in the Treatise. From the basis of this distinction in duties, he now proceeds to argue that the Contractarian claim to base the duty of allegiance on the duty of fidelity (promise-keeping which—recall—is the third rule of justice) is a conceptual redundancy. We keep our promises and also obey our rulers because both are necessary for social life. That necessity is sufficient explanation—in either case “we gain nothing by resolving one into the other” (E-OC: 481). Turning to the “historical prong,” Hume argues that the claim that government originated in a contract is “not justified by history or experience in any age or country of the world” (E-OC: 471). The actual origins do not correspond to a Lockean-type story of free, equal individuals contracting with each other. Hume does allow that the effective equality of individuals does mean that an element of consent was involved in the establishment of government. However he denies that in practice this amounted to any more than falling in behind an originally temporary war-leader; it is clear, he maintains, that there was “no compact or agreement . . . expressly formed for general submission.” Moreover even if some element of consent is present it was never the sole principle (E-OC: 474).

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If the Contractarian account of origins is empirically invalid, it is even less tenable when it claims the legitimacy of current government rests on consent (E-OC: 469), since if “these reasoners” were to examine actual practice and belief they “would meet with nothing that in the least corresponds to their ideas” (E-OC: 470). Neither rulers nor subjects believe their relationship is the effect of some prior pact. This is a damaging line of argument. The very core of Contractarian doctrine is that it is on some current awareness, in the form of giving consent, making a contract or giving a promise, that the legitimacy of rule depends. Accordingly the absence of that awareness (an act Hume declares to be “unknown to all of them”) is fatal to the theory’s cogency. Hume reinforces the argument by also pointing out the implausibility of any notion of “tacit consent.” Locke, because of the role his arguments played in early-eighteenth-century British political debate (Kenyon, 1977), was Hume’s acknowledged target (E-OC: 487). According to Locke, those who enjoy the protection of the laws (even by only traveling on the highway) were tacitly giving their consent (1961: II, §119) and it is a signal of withdrawal of consent if they leave the jurisdiction (§121). Hume pours scorn on this notion. He asks rhetorically how serious is any account that claims a “poor peasant or artisan” who knows no foreign language and has no capital has a “free choice to leave his country” (E-OC: 475). This is

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analogous, he claims, to remaining aboard ship and freely consenting to the captain’s rule even though one was carried aboard asleep and the only alternative is leaping overboard and drowning.

iii Time and legitimacy

There is a wider point of considerable importance contained in this critique. Hume is severing the link between origins and legitimacy. His argument thus far has been essentially negative but he does develop his own significant positive counterpart. For Hume all the evidence points to the fact that all existing governments were originally founded on usurpation or conquest (E-OC: 471); that is, “in plain terms, force by dissolving the ancient government is the origin of all the new ones which ever were established in the world” (E-OC: 474). It was in order to sidestep these considerations that the Contractarians had sought the touchstone of legitimacy in an original contract. But, as we have seen, Hume recognized that this touchstone was not true to the facts. This recognition sets the agenda for his own positive argument. This does not mean he is condoning violence (there is nothing more dangerous to liberty than an authority acquired from usurpation [E-RC: 374]) but he is committed to demonstrating how illegitimate origins (force) can produce legitimate

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allegiance; how might can change into right. (Against the backdrop of the “abdication” of James II and the “invitation” to William and Mary to accept the throne in 1688 and then the Hanoverian succession of 1714 the practical purchase of this entire line of enquiry is not going to be far away.) How might becomes right pivots on the effect of time—it is “time alone” that “gives solidity” to the right of rulers to govern (T 3-2-10.4). A few pages later he repeated the observation with a significant refinement, “time and custom give authority to all forms of government and all successions of princes; and that power which at first was founded only on injury and violence becomes in time legal and obligatory” (T 3-2-10.19: my emphasis). This link between time and custom, which we will explore more thoroughly in the next subsection, has a direct bearing on legitimacy. For Hume it is a “wonder” how easy it is for a few to rule over the many, especially since strength (of numbers) must always lie with the latter. All the governors (the few) can rely on is “opinion” (E-FPG: 32). Hume proceeds to distinguish between “opinion of interest,” based on “the sense of advantage reaped from government,” and “opinion of right,” which is subdivided into “right to power” and “right to property” (E-FPG: 33). He takes the latter of these two subdivisions to be well-established, and his chief example of the former is attachment to “ancient

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government” since, and this the point of current moment, “antiquity always begets the opinion of right” (E-FPG: 33). “Opinion” here is another manifestation of the importance of “belief” and “expectation”; the fact that allegiance reposes on a disposition in the minds of those who obey. This disposition is the effect of habit for “men once accustomed to obedience never think of departing from that path in which they and their ancestors have constantly trod” (E-OG: 39). Obedience or allegiance is a habitually induced (artificial) virtue the source of which is the “general and obvious interests” in maintaining the authority of magistrates as they function to restrain “our primary instincts to indulge ourselves in unlimited freedom” (E-OC: 480). As we have already noted, while “the support which allegiance brings to justice be founded on obvious principles of human nature,” this support is not the product of clear-sighted and cool-headed deliberation, men “cannot be expected . . . beforehand” to discover or foresee this (E-OG: 39). Humans thus form socially necessary habits but this does not mean some extraordinary Legislator, like that revived by Rousseau (1968: II, 7) is necessary to engineer them into existence; instead it is the (unnatural) conjunction of human nature and circumstances that, as we have seen, ineluctably generates conventions which acquire “force by a slow progression” and by “repeated experience” (T 3-2-2.10).

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Hume is here extending the established principle of prescription. In the Treatise in his discussion of property Hume had defined prescription or long possession as conveying title “to any object” (T 3-2-3. 9). This principle is a standard component in the jurisprudential account of property but in its received reading it did not have a transformative effect. Hume was aware (H: III, 394n) that his usage was contrary to the standard understanding. Standardly, it was accepted that prescriptive title to property presupposed that it was obtained in “good faith.” The conservative dimension to this, where what matters is longevity and continuity and not some normative commitment to the special significance of “origins” was duly picked up by Burke and William Paley (see Chapter 3) who closely follow Hume to the extent of appropriating his language. But even so some care is required since the transformative effect is procedural not substantive, that is, it need not serve “conservative ends.” Hence Hume, when paraphrasing the arguments of the “lovers of liberty” (the “Parliamentary cause”) in their debate with Charles II, can appropriately remark that “prescription, and the practice of so many ages, must long ere this time have given a sanction to these assemblies” (H: III, 70). Hume applies the notion of prescriptive title to the entitlement to rule. Hence in the essay on the original contract, he observes that subjects from originally obeying a ruler out of “fear and necessity” come to

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consent willingly “because they think that from long possession he has acquired a title” (E-OC: 475). Hume here has reversed the order of normative cause and effect. People consent because they think their rulers are entitled to their obedience; they do not think that entitlement is the effect of an act of consent on their part (E-OC: 478).

iv Custom

Time is clearly essential to prescription and its role there is indicative of the wide and pervasive role it plays in Hume’s thought. For Hume since time produces nothing “real” then to talk of property, or title, as the effect of time can only mean it is the “offspring of the sentiments on which time alone is found to have any influence” (T 3-2-3.9). Time influences sentiments not directly but indirectly because it is the medium through which custom or habit operates and “nothing causes any sentiment to have greater influence upon us than custom” (T 3-2-10.4). Custom, says Hume in the Treatise, induces a facility in doing an action (practice makes perfect as the proverb has it) and thence an inclination or tendency to doing it (T 2-3-5.1 cf. U 5.5). Hume remarks that it is an “effect of custom” that it “gives us an affection” for something we have long enjoyed. (This could be referred to as a “conservative disposition—see

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Chapter 4.) This affection informs our preferences. We prefer to retain possession of a familiar object to one that it is more valuable but unknown (T 2-2-4.8) and, conversely, we can “easily live without possessions” that we are “not accustom’d to” (T 3-2-3.4). Implicit here is that humans routinize their behavior. It is not that they are incapable of novelty or will not rise to challenges; they can break from custom and disturb the psychological coziness that comes from doing what is habitually done. But even this break—if persisted with—can in turn lead to a new comforting pattern of behavior; it is part of the power of custom that it can turn pain into pleasure (T 23.5.1). While this can apply on an individual level (as I grow to like malt whisky), the real impact derives from the fact that habits and customs are mutually reinforcing; the human mind “is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments” (E-PG: 60). This echoes the argument about the effect of communication on national character since if a group of humans converse often enough, they will acquire a “similarity of manners” (E-NC: 202). Hume refers to the imitation of “Roman manners” by the conquered Gauls as weaning them (over about a century) from their “ancient prejudices” (E-PG: 61-2n). A custom is necessarily a creature of time; usurpers do not suddenly become endowed with legitimacy. In order that a routine or a set of stable beliefs

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can be established there has to be some fixity or constancy in the experience. Habits are repeated responses to a stable set of circumstances. This repetitiveness leaves its mark and is especially significant regarding political authority. In a strong passage that reflects Hume’s downplaying of human autonomy in its rationalistic individualist guise, he remarks that human societies are comprised of continually changing populations so that to achieve any stability it is necessary that “the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution and nearly follow the path which their fathers, treading in the footsteps of theirs, had marked out to them” (E-OC: 476–7). The “brood” conforms not as a consequence of any deliberate (or as we might say with the metaphor, “adult”) decision but because there is a preexistent path. This path they follow because they neither know no other route nor even consider the possibility of there being one. As Hume puts it in another related essay, and expressing again his positive account of legitimacy, “habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded and men once accustomed to obedience never think of departing from that path in which they and their ancestors have constantly trod” (E-OG: 39). As this quotation indicates, habits or customary ways of behaving not only stabilize they also constrain by

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circumscribing the range of effective or discernible options. This delimiting of options applies to institutions as well as to individuals. Governments, for example, do not operate on a blank canvas; they are constrained by the inertial weight of received “opinion,” and customary way of doing things. There is an appropriate “moral” here—and one drawn frequently in conservative thought. It is “dangerous” for a legislator to embark on “violent innovations” (E-OC: 477). Hume, as ever, is nondogmatic. This is a rule that has exceptions (as with Henry VIII’s break with Catholicism). Less dramatically Hume admits (as does Burke [1987: 19]) that innovations do have a place, though when the magistrate attempts some public improvements he will wisely “adjust his innovations, as much as possible to the ancient fabric and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution” (E-IPC: 513). The “wise magistrate” will be aware that “habits more than reason” are “in everything . . . the governing principle of mankind” (H: III, 116). Since customs are creatures of time then time, that is, gradual alterations in the sentiments of people, is what changes them. I want to examine two crucial instances of this pervasive Humean theme. These are chosen to exemplify two seemingly contrasting aspects of his thought. The first is his critical account of the role of religion, the second (in Section F) is his positive account of the growth of “civilization.”

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E Superstition While Hume clearly appreciates the conservative power of custom he also recognizes that customs can be bad as well as good, though in either case they are capable of enduring for a considerable period. It is here where we can best discern Hume’s polemical streak since the major example of a “bad” custom is a “superstition.” In an early essay he identifies “weakness, fear, melancholy together with ignorance” as true sources of superstition (E-SE: 74). Though his focus here is on a contrast between superstition and enthusiasm as species of “false religion,” he sustains his critique of superstition throughout his work and what is increasingly salient is the link with ignorance. Hence when characterizing “savage life,” the feature that Hume uniformly identifies is that they are ignorant (N: 35, 43, 44, U 10.20 etc.) and “from the grossness of its superstitions we may infer the ignorance of the age” (H: III, 113, H: I, 148). For example, it is because they are ignorant of the true connections between causes and effects that savages call upon the immediate and discrete action of gods to explain phenomena (especially those that frighten them). This ignorance is attributable to their circumstances. A savage is a necessitous creature, pressed by “numerous wants and passions” (N: 35). These pressing needs mean a lack of leisure and that shortcoming means

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no time to contemplate. The natural propensity to anthropomorphize will produce polytheism if it is not “corrected by experience and reflection” (N: 41). What is crucial is the relative breadth of experience and the opportunity to reflect (Berry, 2000). Religious belief in this way is thoroughly naturalized, another feature of common life that the science of man will explain (T Introd.5). A crucial consequence of this assessment of savages as ignorant and superstitious is that Hume does not regard their “way of life” as self-authenticating; rather it is open to external evaluation (Berry, 2007). Just because polygamy, for example, is explicable as a naturally human contrived institution does not mean, Hume believes, that it cannot be appraised as to its comparative utility and, indeed, pronounced as barbaric and “odious” (E:PD: 183, 185). The universalism of human nature allows a scientist of man to judge between true (better) and false (worse) institutional expressions. Hence by Hume’s lights, the science of man can, for example, properly judge the Koran to be a “wild and absurd performance” (E-ST: 229) or, again, condemn modern convents as “bad institutions . . . as nurseries of superstition, burthensome to the public and oppressive to the poor prisoners, male as well as female” and, as a final illustration, he upbraids “classical” authors for not speaking of infanticide with the “horror it deserves” (E-PAN: 398–9).

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Underpinning and informing these judgments is the fact that what the scrutiny of scientists/philosophers uncovers more generally is that humans have universally felt the same about the same kinds of things. In the Conclusion to the Second Enquiry Hume spells this out. The “notion of morals” itself implies a sentiment “so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind” (M 9.5). Indeed, “the humanity of one man is the humanity of every one; and the same object touches this passion in all human creatures” (M 9.6). Hence, illustratively, it is the universal “structure of human nature” that “unavoidably” makes everyone condemn, that is express the “sentiment of disapprobation” toward, treachery and barbarity (M App. 1.6). This is what humans do; they so judge because it is (the scientifically warranted) nature of human nature that, when analyzed, what they approve of is “every quality which is useful or agreeable to ourselves or others” (M 9.3). That universal ground of approbation may however be overlaid with the “delusive glosses of superstition and false religion” (M 9.3). As Hume’s very language here indicates superstitions cannot be taken to represent equally valid ways of living. They are local deviations from the evidentially supported universalism that is the (human) natural source of all moral distinctions and value-laden forms of life. There can be no other credible locus. Morality is not miraculous

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and nor are social practices/institutions normatively sui generis. Superstitions fall clearly under this rubric. In that early essay mentioned earlier Hume judges it fits men for slavery and is thus an enemy to civil liberty (in that respect enthusiasm fares better). This evaluative capacity goes to the heart of Hume’s enterprise (Garrett, 1997: 240). This is indicatively encapsulated at the beginning of the First Enquiry when he declares that philosophers should not leave superstition “in possession of her retreat” but, echoing the militaristic image in the Introduction to the Treatise, rather “draw an opposite conclusion and perceive the necessity of carrying the war into the most secret recesses of the enemy” (U 1.12). Recall again that the science of man as the “only solid foundation” is “much superior in utility” to any other form of human comprehension (T Introd.7, 10). This utility should not be underplayed. Hume’s science of man is programmatic and since that rests on, and supports, the universality of human nature then it can serve as a benchmark. One key central manifestation of this utility is its ability to discount all supernatural accounts of morality and to replace them with a naturalistic account. This replacement is not a neutral activity. While philosophical errors are ridiculous those of religion are dangerous (T 1-4-7.13). Moreover, as he spells out in the following paragraph, it is the science of man

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that can disarm the latter by correcting the former, by establishing, that is, a “set of opinions . . . satisfactory to the human mind” (T 1-4-7.14), for we “ought to prefer that which is safest and most agreeable” (T 1-47.13). Without any scruple philosophy is preferable to “superstition of every kind or denomination” (T 14-7.13). In other words, central to the utility of the science of man is its capacity to evaluate different ways of living. And since these “ways” comprise fundamentally customs and habits then it means he is seeking to replace one set of customs by another “better” set (Laursen, 1992: 166 but compare MacIntyre [1985: 231] who judges that Hume’s position is highly ideological, reflecting the prejudices of the Hanoverian ruling elite). Hence for all the “conservatism” that comes from recognizing their intractability, and from acknowledging that “external” revolutions are dangerous and inapt, Hume does not think this provides a “normative trump” to conserve indifferently a set of current customs.

F Commerce and the Rule of Law If superstitions are bad customs that are, among other defects, inimical to liberty, then those customs that underwrite civilization and liberty are good ones and it is to those, and their emergence, that I now turn. I start by outlining the narrative of the growth of

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“liberty” that Hume employs in his History and then I shall examine its corollary—the defense of the modern commercial world and the liberty with which that is associated. This features above all in his Political Discourses of 1752. i The decline of the barons

Hume identifies a “great revolution in manners” occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth century (H: III, 58). More precisely the context for this judgment is the growth of the crown’s authority, which began in the reign of Henry VII but stretched into the reign of Elizabeth. Hume, after referring to a number of “peculiar causes” of this growth, then claims that the “manners of the age were a general cause.” The outline story is that the “habits of luxury” dissipated the fortunes of the great barons, cities increased, the “middle rank of men” began to grow rich and eventually the “farther progress of the same causes begat a new plan of liberty,” though in the interim the sovereign took advantage to assume an “authority almost absolute” (H: II, 602). We can discern in this treatment that the decisive change in this “secret revolution of government” (as he characterizes it) is the subversion of the power of the barons and it is of this that Hume declares that “the change of manners was the chief cause” (H: II, 603).

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Pivotal in this process was the alteration in the behavior (habitual way of life) of the medieval barons. They changed from spending their surplus on “ancient hospitality” and maintaining thereby many retainers to acquiring, “by degrees,” a “taste for elegant luxury” in housing and apparel. Hume here neither accounts for the source of this luxury (though cites foreign trade elsewhere [E-Com: 263]) nor identifies the hidden motivating passion(s) among the “constant and universal springs of human nature,” which, from the list of “regular springs” supplied in the First Enquiry (quoted earlier), are likely to be avarice, self-love, and vanity (U 8.7). What mattered in practice was that the limited availability of these luxury items restricted their acquisition to those few who could supposedly afford them. However, their desirability was decisively abetted by peer-group emulation (E-RA: 276) so that their appeal spread to the generality of the nobility (and later via imitation diffused down to the lesser gentry [H: III, 99]). This taste, once acquired, became habitual and to feed this habit the nobles retrenched on their hospitality and reduced the number of their retainers. Having fewer dependent retainers the barons were less able to resist the execution of the sovereign’s laws thus inadvertently, in due course, advancing the rule of law and its entailed consequence the security of private property. Moreover, by spending money on goods they “promoted arts and

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industry” (H: II, 601) and “gave subsistence to mechanics and merchants who lived in an independent manner on the fruits of their own industry” (H: II, 602). If we are to explain this growth in sovereign authority, this “revolution in government,” then it is inadequate to look to legislation passed, the revolution is “secret” or hidden from view not overtly apparent. What matters is not passing laws but what makes them effective. Hume judges Elizabeth’s attempts to restrain luxury by proclamation to be ineffective because it was out of step with the temper of the times (H: II, 602). While particular pieces of legislation are by definition “individual” or “peculiar,” law/government is a social institution which means appropriate and commensurate social causes are needed to account for changes (revolution) in it. And, as we have already pointed out, Hume explicitly identifies “the change of manners” as “the chief cause” of this revolution and, as we have also observed, it takes a “long course of time . . . to produce those great revolutions . . .” The practical corollary is that sovereigns, because they have to take “mankind as they find them,” cannot “pretend to introduce any violent change” (E-Com: 260). The nature of government, and revolutions in public affairs, we recall, were the major type of moral causation and this story from the History echoes Hume’s analysis in the Political Discourses, especially

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“Of Commerce” and “Refinement of Arts.” It is to these that we can now turn and in so doing can expand on some aspects of the historical narrative. ii The defense of commerce and luxury

These two essays can best be read as Hume refuting a long-standing prejudice against commerce and luxury. This refutation is one of the strongest planks in Hume’s espousal of what we can now identify as “liberalism.” This has two aspects. Most profoundly he rejects the underlying basic philosophical premises of those who oppose commerce and, secondly and consequently, he rejects the main ingredients of a powerful strand of political thinking, civic republicanism. Hume opens “Refinement of Arts” (originally titled “Of Luxury”) by stating that “luxury” is a word of “uncertain signification” (E-RA: 268). This reflects that this topic was heavily debated at the time. On one side were critics who drew on classical denunciations (Hume refers to these as “severe moralists,” Sallust is named as an example) on the other were defenders (notoriously Mandeville). Against this backcloth Hume gives his own definition: luxury is “great refinement in the gratification of senses” (E-RA: 268). Any thought that this is intended to be read censoriously as an endorsement of the moralists

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is displaced by his generalizing remark that “ages of refinement” are “both the happiest and most virtuous” (E-RA: 269). By coupling luxury/refinement with happiness/virtue and not opposing them Hume is here clearly breaking from the moralist tradition. If people are now “happier” in what does this happiness consist? Hume identifies three components— repose, pleasure, and action (E-RA: 269–70). Of these the last is crucial. The first is merely derivative, only valued as a break from action. The second is integrally connected with action because “being occupied” is itself enjoyable. It is the twist that Hume gives to “action” that is crucial. The focus is not the “civic republican” preoccupation with political or public affairs (rei publicae), but the private endeavor of industry. Where industry abounds then individuals will be not only opulent but also happy as its members “reap the benefit of . . . commodities so far as they gratify the senses and appetite” (E-Com: 263). If we ask what motivates them, Hume answers “avarice and industry, art and luxury” (E-Com: 263). The fact that “avarice” was uniformly condemned by the severe moralists signals the switch in evaluations that has occurred. We can pursue what was involved in that switch by picking up on Hume’s further remark that humans are roused to activity or industry by a “desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed” (E-Com: 264).

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The use of “desire” here is significant but it will require a short excursion in the history of ideas to establish that point. Hume’s usage in that phrase entails a fundamental rejection of the assumptions of the severe moralists. That rejection is integral to Hume’s acceptance of “modern” philosophy, upon which the entire project of a “science of man” builds. As a sweeping generalization, the pivot of modern thought is a rejection of Aristotlean teleological philosophy. According, to this philosophy the “end” or telos of (say) food is to assuage hunger and desire is limited to the attainment of that natural end and to desire food when not hungry is to manifest “imperfection” (Aristotle, 1976: 1097b). Moreover, to care about the quality of the food is also beside the point. The modern view rejects the idea that desires can be limited to some fixed end and the principle of a desire-less state. As Hobbes pointed out, the only way to be “free” of desire is to be dead (1991: 70). Humans ever move toward what they imagine pleases and away from what they imagine will occasion pain. In this premodern context, severity and poverty are virtues and luxury a vice or corruption. These virtues are an expression of the “simple” or “natural life.” Those who live simply will not be poor because, on this understanding, “poverty” is only experienced by those who desire more than the limits set by Nature (who care for edible delicacies, characteristic of that

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“more splendid way of life” identified by Hume). And once the natural limit is passed then there is no resting place and, viewed from that perspective, life will always appear too short. Those who see matters in this light will (to quote Seneca [1969: 138]) become “soft through a life of luxury” and accordingly afraid of death. Such fear is unmanly hence in the classical critique the firm association between luxury and softness and effeminacy. On this understanding men who live a life of luxury become effeminate. That is to say they become “soft,” unable to endure hardship and to act courageously in the definitively (even etymologically) masculine fashion. To live luxuriously is to devote oneself to the pleasures of self-indulgence and avarice. Such a life has social consequences. A society where luxury is established will devote itself to private ends since men will be unwilling to act (fight) for the public good. This society, it follows, will be militarily weak—a nation of cowards will easily succumb. It was further assumed that preeminent among those who served their private interest were traders or merchants. Compared to a “citizen,” that is, one who dedicated his life to the active pursuit of the public good, a merchant lived a less fulfilling, less humanly worthwhile life. This disparagement, present in Aristotle for example (1944: 1257a–1258a), was sharpened once commerce began to spread. Over and

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beyond that commerce was suspect because of the uncertainty or risk that lies at its core—there is no guarantee that you will be able to sell your goods. And since the system rests on nothing more tangible than belief, opinion, and expectation then it seemed clearly too insubstantial to support a social order. These classical jeremiads were rejuvenated by the experience of the spectacular financial collapses of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century such as the South Sea Bubble. What gave weight to these concerns was that there existed a contrasting model in the person of the independent landowner or country gentleman. This individual enjoys the “masculine” virtues of stability and certainty, in sharp and deliberate contrast to the “feminine” traits of fluidity and the unreliability of a money economy. The only way a luxurious, soft nation could meet its military commitments or needs was by hiring others to play that role. To make that feasible the nation had to have the wherewithal. Hence arose the important association between luxury, wealth (commerce), and mercenary armies. For classical republicans this was a negative association so that commerce too became tarred with the anti-luxury brush. This meant that to defend commerce required a deflection or subversion of the traditional case against luxury. We can now return directly to Hume’s defense of luxury and his rebuttal of the moralized case

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(Berry, 2008). One strategy in this rebuttal was to accept the connection between commerce and softness but to construe this positively. Hume does this by developing a contrast between the civilized or refined on the one hand and the barbarous or rude on the other. He declares that it is “peculiar” to “polished or . . . luxurious ages” that “industry, knowledge and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain” (E-RA: 271). It is a mark of the growth in “humanity” that it has, in part, expressed itself in the “tempers” of men being “softened” and one manifestation of this softening of manners is that wars are less cruel and the aftermath more humane (E-RA: 274). Here is a basic rescheduling of virtues. There is a shift from an emphasis on martial virtues, like courage and glory, to a stress upon the “gentle” virtues of humanity, industry, and justice (H: II, 81; M 7.15). Despite this Hume denies that this softening has enervated “the martial spirit.” The supposed causal link between luxury and military weakness is undermined by the cases of France and England, that is, of the two most powerful and most polished and commercial societies (E-RA: 275). Since a state’s “power” hinges on its military capacity it means that Hume is contending that a commercial society is potent not impotent, is virile not effeminate. His contention has both a positive and a negative aspect. Negatively he holds that the population of a

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nontrading society will be indolent and its soldiers will lack knowledge, skill, and industry. These deficiencies make them fit only for sudden confrontations, because regular attack or defense is beyond them (E-RA: 260). Positively, a civilized nation, precisely because it is industrious and knowledgeable, will be an effective military power. The root cause is that a nation’s power increases in proportion as it increases labor employed “beyond mere necessaries.” The effect of this cause is that the nation possesses a storehouse of labor (E-RA: 272; E-Com: 262). This store can be drawn on to meet military need. In a civilized nation an army is raised by imposing a tax, this reduces consumption of unnecessary luxury goods thus releasing manufacturers of such goods for military service (E-Com: 261). There is a deeper dimension to Hume’s analysis. This is revealed in his comment that the sort of society presupposed by the critics of luxury is contrary to the “natural bent of the mind” (E-Com: 263). Here Hume refers explicitly to Sparta (Berry, 1994: 142–52). Spartan policy goes against the grain of human nature because its devotion to the “public good” is too difficult to sustain. Hume supposes that if a “city” today became a “fortified camp,” such that its inhabitants had both a “martial genius” and “passion for the public good,” then, indeed, all “arts and luxury” could be banished (E-Com: 262–3). But this supposition is

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unrealistic. The touchstone of realism is the knowledge of human nature gleaned from “cautious observation.” The requisite devotion to the public good is “too disinterested” to have an effective purchase on human behavior. While Hume had argued that, on the basis of “common experience,” the “kind affections” overbalance the selfish yet it is true, as his analysis of justice presumed, that “in the original frame of our mind, our strongest attention is confin’d to ourselves” (T 3-2-2.8). Two noteworthy consequences follow. First, civic virtue is too fragile a base on which to erect a system of government and second, relatedly, this means that in the normal run of things governments must govern men by those passions that most effectively animate them. It is accordingly sensible, and in practice greatly preferable, to conduct public affairs from the solid foundation of natural human inclinations rather than anything that might have transpired in Sparta. To govern men along Spartan lines would require a “miraculous transformation of mankind” (E-RA: 280). Government, however, is not in the business of miracles; it must deal with the world as it is and men as they are (E-Com: 260). All it can do is channel the passions so that their effects minimize social disharmony. What underpins this is Hume’s modern epistemology. In contrast to the classical framework, where the proper response to unruly passions was the

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cultivation and application of reason, Hume, in line with the “modern” view, regards reason as inert (T 3-1-1.10). All it can do, as he notoriously says, is serve and obey the passions for it is they that “move” us (T 2-3-3.4). Accordingly, the “magistrate” can “very often” only cure one vice by encouraging another, where the latter’s effects are less damaging. It makes no sense to criticize the magistrate for not imposing in line with “classical” principles some objective, rational doctrine of the “good life.” Instead the appropriate judgment is: does this policy promote the material well-being of those individuals subject to it? Understood in this way then luxury can be justly cultivated because it is superior to sloth. Moreover, by defending luxury in this way Hume is still able to criticize Mandeville and allow that it can be “vicious” as well as innocent. Yet even then it might still be better to accept it than attempt vainly to eradicate it (E-RA: 279–80). A central feature of this defense of the world of commerce—of industry, knowledge, and humanity— is a defense of liberty. Hume declares that “progress in the arts” is favorable to liberty and the establishment of the rule of law (E-RA: 277). This itself is a “modern” view of liberty. Its modernity can be appreciated if we return briefly to his account of the gradual emergence of the rule of law. To gloss this account we can say that the institution of the rule of law arose

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causally from a two-stage change in manners. First, the cause of the emergence of “general and regular execution of laws” (H: II, 603) was the loss by the barons of their localized power-bases (the erosion of the habit of obedience to their rule by those dependent upon them) thus removing the key obstacle to central authority. Second this “regular execution” became entrenched as the discretion of the central authority in its turn became curtailed. The cause of this subsequent restriction was the rise of the commons, composed of the middle rank whose numbers had been increased by those retainers released by the barons and whose power increased pari passu with the growth of commerce. It is this curtailment of the power of the crown that Hume depicts as the monarchy acceding to the “new” (or modern) “plan of liberty.” The role played here by the “middling rank of men” (tradesmen and merchants) Hume had explained in his Essays. In “Refinement of Arts” he says this rank is the “best and firmest basis of public liberty” because they “covet equal laws” (E-RA: 277–8). In this essay adumbrating the later detailed discussion in the History, he contrasts this condition to that of the “rude unpolished nations,” by which he here means that characterized by the rule of barons as “petty tyrants.” This is not an isolated reference. Another illustration of the same phenomenon is the twin absence among the Anglo-Saxons of “true liberty”

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and a “middle rank of men” (H: I, 115, 116). These individuals are neither too poor to submit themselves to abject dependence nor too rich to be able to tyrannize others. But, importantly, this liberty is enjoyed by all. This inclusiveness demarcates it sharply from “ancient liberty.” Ancient liberty was exclusive. It was enjoyed by those who had leisure and that was made possible, as Hume (E-Com: 257; E-PAN: 383) pointed out, with a “dig” at “republicans” (or “zealous partisans of civil liberty” [E-PAN: 385]) by the presence of a class of slaves. The abolition of slavery was part of the civilizing process brought on by the emergence of the commercial way of life—its customs and habits.

iii The rule of law and expectation

The maintenance of the rule of law and not the “republican” pursuit of virtue is the major task of government. From this it follows, again relegating the preoccupations of republicans, that the degree of civilization now becomes the most informative criterion for distinguishing between types of government. Here lies the significance of Hume’s comment that “it may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of laws and men” (E-CL: 94 cf. H: II, 15). By what criterion is that affirmation sustainable? Hume answers by declaring that in these

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monarchies “property is there secure, industry encouraged, the arts flourish.” The monarch himself lives secure among his subjects (E-CL: 94), even though, as he admits in another essay, he “alone is unrestrained in the exercise of his authority” (E-AS: 125). Yet because the regime here too is identified as a “civilized monarchy” then all the other ministers or magistrates “must submit to the general laws which govern the whole society.” The people depend on the sovereign alone for the security of their property but since “he is so far removed from them and is so much exempt from private jealousies” then “this dependence is scarcely felt” (E-AS: 125). While such a monarchy, he continues, is given “in high political rant” the name “tyranny” when, in fact, by its “just and prudent administration” and provision of “security to the people” it “meets most of the ends of political society.” This line of argument became central to his attempt at an impartial history of England but also for the contemporary reception of it as “Tory” (see Chapter 1). Hume can put forward two further arguments once the explanatory weight falls on the qualifier “civilized” rather than the substantive “monarchy.” First, he can accept as an historical argument that the “arts and sciences” can only be generated by free states or “republics.” This argument relies on a series of causal connections: stability from a framework of law

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causes security, security is a causal precondition for the exercise of curiosity and that exercise is required if knowledge (whence arts and sciences) is to be obtained (E-AS: 118). But although republics are necessary at the beginning (are the “nursery” [E-AS: 119]) once the civilizing process has begun it can be taken over and continued by monarchies. Second, luxury, as an ally of commerce not only undercuts the case for republics it also inhibits absolutism since, when it is diffused among the population, it diminishes the force and ambition of the sovereign (E-Com: 257). Absolute government, he claims, “by its very nature” is “hurtful to commerce” (E-CL: 92). This claim rests not on the threat of “absolutism” to the security of property but, rather, on the social fact that commerce is not thought honorable in a society where “birth, titles and place must be honoured above industry and riches” (E-CL: 93 cf. E-AS: 126). A consequence of this social disparagement of industry is that the “poverty of the common people” is a “natural if not infallible effect of absolute monarchy” (E-Com: 265). There is more than a contingent link here between commerce and liberty under law. There is also a conceptual affinity and it is here where the role of “expectation” in Hume’s philosophy makes its mark. To appreciate this we can return to his emphasis on the inflexibility of justice. This was a necessary characteris-

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tic to enable confidence and expectations to be established. But it is precisely in a commercial society where this establishment is a sine qua non. Commerce or trade implies markets and they imply exchange but exchange presupposes specialization. I will only specialize in making screws in the expectation that others are specializing in screwdrivers, hammers, nails, saws, and so on, so that when I take my wares to market I can via the medium of money exchange them for theirs. This means acting now in expectation of future return. Hume expresses this “logic” when he writes, [the poorest artificer] expects that when he carries his goods to market and offers them at a reasonable price, he shall find purchasers and shall be able, by the money he acquires, to engage others to supply him with those commodities which are requisite for his subsistence. In proportion as men extend their dealings and render their intercourse with others more complicated, they always comprehend in their schemes of life a greater variety of voluntary actions which they expect, from the proper motives, to co-operate with their own (U 8.17).

What is required to underwrite this entire series is predictability or confidence (this passage derives from the chapter on Liberty and Necessity). Where

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the actions of others are not predictable, where the rule of law does not obtain, then it is better (more rational) to be independent and self-sufficient and not rely on anyone—I make all my own tools. But, of course, that option means forgoing the advantages of specialization (the tools are not very good, even screws). Hence it is that precommercial societies are impoverished. This is not the “noble” poverty enjoined by the severe moralist in his advocacy of the “natural life” nor that promoted by Christian asceticism; on the contrary, it is, in very basic material way, a depiction of destitution. As we noted above this reliance on predictability was thought by commerce’s critics to be its Achilles heel; a commercial society is fundamentally unsound since it seemingly rests on nothing more substantial than a tissue of beliefs. This can be seen (in the etymologically appropriate) operation of credit in a commercial society. It is here where Hume himself seems to entertain some doubts. These hinge on the modern expedient of public debt. The ploy was to mortgage public revenues while trusting that posterity will pay off the debt. But, of course, the immediate “posterity” will merely “pass the buck” on to their successors and they to theirs with the upshot that the expedient will lead to the accumulation of debt and eventual ruin (E-PC: 350). In contrast to this “ruinous” expenditure, ancient practice was to hoard

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treasure in peace-time in order to conquer or defend in time of war. This is Hume’s opening point in his essay “Of Public Credit” and it shapes the ensuing argument. (The essay was written while Britain was engaged in the Seven Years War.) In particular it colors his declaration that “either the nation must destroy public credit or public credit will destroy the nation” (E-PC: 360–1). National destruction follows from the abuses of mortgaging. These abuses “almost infallibly” produce “poverty, impotence and subjection to foreign powers” (E-PC: 351). The nation will become overburdened with taxes and eventually not enough will be raised to meet requirements. If the government is now confronted with an emergency then, acting like an absolute ruler (cf. E-CL: 96), it will seize the monies earmarked for interest repayment. Though it will swear to replace them, this abrogation of “public faith” will bring the “tottering fabric” to the ground. This scenario Hume calls “the natural death of public credit” (E-PC: 363). But an even worse scenario is possible. This recourse to voluntary bankruptcy runs too much against the grain of “popular government” (cf. E-CL: 96) with the result that no resources are left and the nation is easy meat for an external conqueror. This is the “violent death of our public credit” (E-PC: 365). This conclusion brings his essay full circle since, as we noted, it opened by contrasting favorably the

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ancient practice of hoarding in order to be ready for war with the modern practice of borrowing (Hont, 1993). For Hume commerce “can never flourish but in a free government” (E-CL: 92) but, as we have now just seen, this combination of factors facilitates the accumulation of public debt which eventually threatens the very survival of the state. This is a chain of events that produces an outcome scarcely envisaged by those who initiated the proceedings. Understood in this way the operation of a system of public credit exemplifies the phenomenon of “unintended consequences” that we discussed earlier in the context of the actual development of government.

G Liberty and Its Qualifications This pessimism or, less starkly, this temperate approach is also expressed in some aspects of his own contemporary commentary. While in no way undermining his defense of inclusive “modern liberty” he is also chary of some claims made by liberal partisans. Hume is not (in his own estimation) given over to “partyrage” or prejudices (E-CL: 87)—hence the reference quoted above to “liberal rant,” that is, the perspective that was blinkered into being in all circumstances anti-absolutism. His major criticism of liberal partisans is that they lack an appreciation of the “balance”

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between liberty and authority. In Hume’s understanding, such a balance characterizes “true or regular liberty” but this “requires such improvement in knowledge and morals as can only be the result of reflection and experience and must grow to perfection during several ages of settled and established government” (H: I, 175). This exemplifies the general maxim that “all advances towards reason and good sense are slow and gradual” (H: I, 249). While Hume is far less committed to “progress” than his (particularly French) contemporaries, these statements clearly acknowledge that progress has been made. Although there is no guarantee that it will continue, or indeed that regression will not occur, we know from the earlier discussion that this progress will take the form of a change in customs and habits, preeminently those associated with the growth of commerce (H: I, 702). While in his History he adopts enough of the conventional Tacitean view that the “Germans” “loved liberty,” this, as we would now expect, is qualified. Liberty, along with valor, are the only virtues that they could exhibit because as an “uncivilized people” they lacked “justice and humanity” (H: I, 10). He reinforces this qualification later when, again, he contrasts “true liberty, where the execution of the laws is the most severe, and where subjects are reduced to the strictest subordination and dependence on the

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civil magistrate” to the “seeming liberty or rather licentiousness of the Anglo-Saxons” (H: I, 115). This contrast between liberty and licentiousness is a commonplace that even the most anarchistically inclined libertarian could accept. Hume, though, is far from giving liberty an indefeasibly privileged status. As his insistence on liberty-under-law indicates it has to be balanced against order, regularity, and authority. The English he affirms have “happily established the most perfect and accurate system of liberty that was ever found compatible with government” (an establishment owing more to “mixture of accident” than “wisdom and foresight”) (H: I, 704). This is only one of several such encomia of the British Constitution—“the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty that was ever known amongst mankind” (H: III, 773 cf H: III, 202n, H: III, 656, E-PrS: 508). But Hume, given his view that “all human institutions are liable to abuse” (H: III, 605), was not complacent and, in contemporary Britain, he did not consider this “system” to be so fixed as to be immune to implosion. In a range of essays he discussed the relation between monarchical or republican rule (typically identified as “free government”), or between despotism or absolutism and liberty. In context, Hume thinks that since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the case for “absolutism” is untenable but for that reason

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claims made for more liberty are not required. To tip the scales too much to liberty risks destabilizing the balance. Indeed, in terms of the title of one his early (1741) essays—“Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic”—he says he would prefer the (inevitable) demise of the state to be in the form of an absolute monarchy rather than a republic (E-BG: 52). The actual argument is rather precious but what is indicative is that he thinks a “republic” would lead to tyrannous factions and they to civil war and that would lead to absolute rule (anyway)—he has England and Cromwell in mind. What underwrites the peerless superiority of the British system, and what makes, thereby, for “true liberty,” is that it is a “mixed government” (E-LP: 10). In one of his last essays Hume says that “in all governments there is perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between authority and liberty.” Liberty (he goes on) is “the perfection of civil society” but only when authority is “acknowledged essential to is very existence.” But that “authority” (in the person of the monarch) must abide by the rule of law, “to act by general and equitable laws that are previously known to all the members and to all their subjects” (E-OG: 40–1). Though this appeared in a posthumously published essay, the History had previously declared liberty to be “so necessary to the perfection of human

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society” (H: III, 71) and that authority and liberty to be both “requisite to government” (H: III, 257). If we step back from Hume’s preoccupation with liberty in its relatively narrow (English) constitutional sense and assess his thought against what are now standardly regarded as “liberal” principles we get a mixed picture. We have already observed that he is no supporter of a Lockean or natural rights-based conception of liberalism or libertarianism. But there is plenty of evidence to enlist him in the “liberal camp.” He is firm in his support for “economic liberty” in that he is opposed to restrictions (“absurd limitations”) on industry such as the erection of corporations (H: II, 56–7); to “unreasonable and iniquitous laws” that damaged trade by prohibiting profits of exchange (“usury”) (H: II, 55); to fixing wages by statute (H: II, 231); to prohibiting (an “absurd law”) cloth manufacture until a seven-year apprenticeship had been served (H: II, 323); to the “pernicious” consequences of granting of patent monopolies (H: II, 573 cf. II, 595, III, 83–4n); to the passing of “ridiculous” sumptuary legislation (H: I, 535 cf. H: II, 231, H: II, 602). In the same vein he advocated consistent, nonarbitrary taxation (E-Tax: 345) and free trade, arguing forcefully against the “narrow and malignant” policies of prohibition (E-JT: 328, E-BT). Hume also supported positive action to remove hindrances to the exercise of economic liberty. While

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this is despite his caution about the effectiveness of purposive intervention it reflects his conviction that some customs are bad. Ireland is a recurrent example (but the contemporary Scottish Highland economy would also qualify, even if Hume is less explicit). Regarding the Irish Hume clearly commends, for example, James I’s “civilizing” policy. In practice this meant reconciling the Irish to “laws and industry,” thus making their subjection “durable and useful to the crown of England,” and to achieve that end it was necessary to “abolish Irish customs which supplied the place of laws and which were calculated to keep that people for ever in a state of barbarism and disorder.” In particular, those customs that hindered “the enjoyment of fixed property in land” (without which there is no incentive “to enclose, to cultivate, to improve”) were replaced (H: III, 33–4). With respect to toleration another key “liberal” principle, Hume’s view is clearly inferable from his scathing comments on religious persecution for heresy and remark that toleration is the most effective way (“the true secret”) of “managing religious factions” (H: II, 580 cf. H: II, 302, H: II, 336, H: III, 625). On occasion he expresses a more explicitly principled view as when he calls toleration “so reasonable a doctrine” (H: III, 320) or, again, when he refers to Elizabeth I’s persecution of papist and puritans as “extremely contrary to the genius of freedom”

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(H: II, 589) and declares “laudable” a 1681 bill repealing her persecuting statute (H: III, 677), as he similarly describes James II’s attempt to “become a great a patron of toleration” (H: III, 378). Finally, we can note in his endorsement of the Protestant Succession, his expressed hope that “the progress of reason will, by degrees, abate the acrimony of opposite religions all over Europe” (E-PrS: 510). Set against these endorsements of “liberty,” but without ever overbalancing them, Hume also expresses qualifications. For example, the unbounded liberty of press enjoyed in England is an “evil” that attends its mixed constitution but, even here, to attempt to foreclose that liberty is a “bare-faced violation” (E-LP: 13, 605 [this passage was omitted from the final editions of the Essays]). The reason for this negative judgment is that this liberty carries matters to the extremes, to the exaggeration of both faults and merits (E-PSc: 27). Hume is so far from an advocate of the separation of church and state that he firmly supports the union of civil and ecclesiastic power. His reasoning, however, is typically Humean. He thinks the clergy should be paid from the public purse, like those employed in armies or magistracy, because if left to make their own living they would be “diligent” in gaining “customers” by “practising on the passions and credulity of the populace.” To pay them a state salary is, in effect, “to bribe their indolence” so they

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have no incentive to stir disorder (H: II, 95). Less cynically, perhaps, Hume elsewhere declares that the union of church and state “in every civilized government” supports “peace and order” by preventing “mutual encroachments” that have been historically shown to have the “most dangerous consequences” (H: I, 215). As a final illustration of Hume’s qualification of liberty I want to pick up again his comments on “opinion.” In the History Hume reiterates (more than once) his position that government is “always founded on opinion not force” but, in the context of the execution of Charles I, he adds a particular gloss. Precisely because government relies on opinion, and because it serves to “restrain the fury and injustice of the people,” then it is “dangerous to weaken . . . the reverence which the multitude owe to authority.” He explicitly locates the source of that danger in the “speculative” reasoning about the doctrine of resistance. From this he draws the conclusion, albeit phrased conditionally, that “if ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to conceal truth from the populace it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example” (H: III, 395). A little later, and in the same approximate context, he says that if choice has to be made then “utility” should be preferred to “truth in public institutions” (H: III, 605). Should that concealment be impractical, which given

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the “licence of human disquisition” is likely, then “the doctrine of obedience ought alone to be inculcated” and any rare exceptions “ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings” (H: III, 395). But even in these remarks, which seem to go beyond “qualifying” liberty to exhibiting antiliberal sentiments, the particular context needs to be recalled. It is the “dethroning” of a “prince” that it is worrisome not “resisting” him. True Hume does in this passage come out with a remark very reminiscent of Burke (1987: 67) when he says the “illusion, if it be an illusion” that makes us “pay a sacred regard” to the persons of princes is “salutary.” That said, however, Hume dismisses the argument of “tracing up government to the Deity” so that it is “sacred and inviolate” with its consequence that no matter how tyrannical a government was, it would be “sacrilege” to “touch or invade it in the smallest article” (E-OC: 466). Similarly the doctrine of passive obedience cannot stand without exception. Despite the “maxims of resistance” being destructively pernicious, nevertheless, this is so only “in general” and resistance can be “lawful and commendable.” Hume is, indeed, careful also to say that this is so only in “extraordinary emergencies” and that his own view is with those who would “draw the bond of allegiance very close” (E-PO: 475–6).

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What does emerge when Hume’s views on liberty are examined as a whole is that he never deviates from the view that “order” is necessary and government is of its essence a restraint on human passions. Such judgments are part of the usual arsenal of “conservative” thinkers and Giarrizzo (1962: 121), for example, thinks this lays bare the conservative tendency of Hume’s thought. I will explore this issue more fully and generally in Chapter 4 but here make some summary comments on Hume’s own argument. Hume does not subscribe to the Augustinian or Hobbesian vision of human nature. He agrees that humans are not angels or perfectible beings so, as with Augustine and Hobbes, there is always need for authority. But Humean humans are not sinners, who, without grace, are ever ensnared in the fundamentally disordered City of Men, nor are they utterly self-centered individuals, ceaselessly pursuing power after power. The former, especially in its recent Calvinist guise, manifests indelibly the traits of superstition and fanaticism. Hobbes’ reduction, in Hume’s reading, of all human motivation to selfishness is evidentially false (T 3-2-2.25; in the History Hobbes’ politics are described as “fitted only to promote tyranny”; and his ethics “to encourage licentiousness” [H: III, 505]). What Hume does contend is that “every man ought to be supposed a knave” (E-IP: 42–3). This

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maxim he concedes is “false in fact” though “true in politics,” by which here he means the operation of “factions.” If this maxim is treated less contextually then it better fits a “liberal” rather than “conservative” message, that is, governments in truth are likely to be “knavish” in pursuit of their interests, hence we require the rule of law, rather than governments who majestically “over-awe” their subjects. While there are similarities between Hume and Burke it would be a mistake to read back these into Hume so he too becomes conservative. Hume’s religious skepticism makes him chary of giving to history or tradition a Providentialist cast or of regarding man a “religious animal” (Burke, 1987: 80) who consecrates the state. Indeed the principle underlying his account of artifice is that for all the limitations on individual reason it is humans themselves who, without any need of divine aid or guidance, have constructed extra-familial social life. Of course this construction needs robust attention and if individuals arrogantly forget their limitations then they can damage the fabric. On these grounds Hume believes it to be a prudent (and moral) maxim to “submit quietly to the government we find establish’d in the country where we live” (T 2-2-10.7). While on a pragmatic or prudential front acting habitually can be the most appropriate course of action this is not the case at all the times or in all

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occasions. Civilized habits are superior to superstitions. It is an intellectual challenge to explain how civilization emerges but we can now with the science of man rise to that challenge. So even if humans most of the time act in a conservative manner, and do so necessarily and beneficially, that is a naturalistic scientific conclusion not some extra or supernatural revelation. Finally, even on the characterization that Hume is a skeptical exponent of the “politics of imper fection” (see Chapter 4), his “liberal” recognition of the need to tackle bad habits, and the superiority of a “civilized” way of life, make him genuinely a thinker of the Enlightenment and not a harbinger of the “reaction” to it. Yet such are the ironies of intellectual history, Hume’s thought was indeed so interpreted. Chapter 3 examines the reception of his work.

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Reception and Inf luence

This chapter surveys, in an inevitably gross-grained way, how Hume’s work was received and gives some indication of its impact. Reception and impact or influence are clearly related without being conterminous, since initial indifference can be replaced over time with an engagement. In order to impart some structure I adopt the following organizing principles. The reception will be examined spatially, that is, I will chart how Hume’s works were read in Britain, but principally in Scotland, North America, and continental Europe, principally in France. Within each of these the relevant Hume texts will be highlighted. But these spatially organized examinations will incorporate a temporal dimension as the influence of these volumes is identified. However, my discussion of this latter dimension is limited. Since Chapter 4 will discuss the contemporary status of Hume’s work then this chapter will concentrate on the reception and impact of Hume’s work in the eighteenth century and only indicate some later influences. One final qualification needs to be entered. In line with the theme of

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this book the principal focus of this chapter is on the reception and influence of Hume’s writing on “moral subjects.”

A Britain Despite his claim in My Own Life, the Treatise, as Hume well knew, did not fall “dead-born.” It stimulated a serious philosophical response from Thomas Reid—regent at King’s College, Aberdeen, later Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. This response generated a distinct “school” (“Common Sense”) with a strong base in Scotland but which resonated widely in Europe and North America. Reid’s argument was epistemological. Reid contested Hume because he made explicit the skepticism that was implicit in the approach to philosophy embarked upon by Descartes and continued through Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley. Contrary to the view that treats the senses as merely means to furnish the mind, Reid argued that every operation of sense implies judgment. These judgments are “original and natural” parts of the “furniture” of human understanding, they direct humans in the “common affairs of life,” and “make up what is called the common sense of mankind” (Reid, 1846a: 209). Hume recognized Reid as a considerable philosopher but did not engage him (in a letter he declared

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that he had never replied to his academic critics [L: II, 81]). Hume, however, was sorely tempted by one of Reid’s followers, James Beattie. Beattie, professor at Marischal College (Aberdeen’s other University) wrote a full-blown assault on Humean skepticism (Beattie, 1974) that garnered him lots of praise including a pension from the king. Hume’s contempt for Beattie was expressed in a letter to his publisher where he says of an advertisement to the 1765 edition of his essays and treatises that it is a “compleat answer to Dr. Reid and to that bigotted silly Fellow Beattie” (L: II, 301). Beattie did, however, draw some blood. In 1753–4 edition of his essay “On National Character,” Hume remarked that “he was apt to suspect the negroes . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion but white” (E-Variants: 629). Beattie accused Hume of merely asserting his position and pointed out that it was falsified by the examples of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians (Beattie, 1974: 311). In the final edition of the essay Hume amended this note to say “scarcely ever” rather than “never” and, arguably sidestepping the Incas, he omitted all reference to nonwhites other than negroes (E-NC: 208n). This interchange has not only generated academic debate (e.g., Popkin [1977], Immerwahr [1992]) but it also had some wider historical impact in as much as Hume’s reputation as an infidel

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meant that to defend the African was also to defend religion (Davis, 1966: 458). Though Reid did in his later writings turn his attention to Hume’s political writings, that aspect of his thought did not occasion much attention from the Common Sense school. One aspect Reid (1846b) does discuss is Hume’s account of the artificiality of justice and his criticism was widely echoed. Reid’s own argument had similarities with that earlier developed by Kames. Kames denied that there is a distinction between gratitude to benefactors (which Hume regards as a natural virtue [E-OC: 479]) and acting justly in as much as justice “belongs to man as such” (Kames, 2005: 40, 48, cf. 54). He seemingly agrees with Hume that justice is the virtue that “guards property and gives authority to covenants” (2005: 65) but believes that property and the obligation to keep our word are both natural principles (2005: 79). Kames does agree with Hume that justice is indispensable (2005: 65 cf. 42) and Adam Smith follows suit (Smith, 1982: 86). Smith does however part company over one key issue. He objects to Hume’s “utilitarian” account of justice. For Smith a concern for specific individuals rather than, as with Hume, a concern with a society’s well-being is the effective source of justice. Smith does not deny utility a role, only that it is the “first or principal source” (1982: 188).

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Hume’s general relation to, and role in, in the history of utilitarianism is complex. Jeremy Bentham, who is typically judged the first systematic exponent of utilitarianism, acknowledged that he took the “principle of utility” from Hume (Bentham, 1977: 508). That acknowledgment appeared as an addition to the second edition of his Fragment on Government (1823) but even in the much earlier (1776) first edition Bentham declared that the “scales fell from his eyes” on reading Hume on virtue (1977: 440). The focus of that revelation is significant because Bentham used utility as a principle or criterion to judge between moral right and wrong and, in particular, to judge the operation of government by this standard (1977: 509). This invocation of a prior “principle” is distinct from Hume’s effectively post facto account of obligation and obedience (see Chapter 2). The Benthamite utilitarian tradition is effectively the dominant one, albeit arguably a less successful one than Hume’s (Plamenatz, 1966: 67). In J. S. Mill’s (1910) canonical restatement of utilitarianism in the mid-nineteenth century Hume does not figure, nonetheless it would be a misleading distortion to efface Hume from any account of a history of utilitarian doctrine, most especially because of his demolition of a number of alternatives such as “natural law” and the privileging of “origins.” This last aspect of Hume’s thought was picked up by Bentham and has proven to be particularly influential.

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Bentham judged that Hume had “effectually demolished” the notion of an original contract (1977: 439). Hume’s historical/empirical refutation of contractarianism fitted well with the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on human sociality and was widely followed (Berry, 1997: chapter 2). Indeed so decisive was Hume’s attack that any subsequent contract theory, as most famously by Kant (1996), had to be reformulated as a conceptual device. It is in that guise that it appeared in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1972), the most important work of political philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, even though Rawls himself openly adopted as a framing device a Humean conception of the “circumstances of justice.” Hume is now regarded as a considerable figure in the history of economics (Wennerlind [2006], Rotwein [1970]), a status that gained significant momentum in the latter part of the twentieth century with “monetarists” like Milton Friedman claiming Hume as a predecessor. In the eighteenth-century Britain, “economic” theory is, of course, dominated by Adam Smith and increasingly so to the eclipse of other theorists including Hume. Hume is, however, a significant presence in the Wealth of Nations. In book 3 Smith makes a rare acknowledgement of a predecessor when he notes the connection between the growth of commerce and freedom, claiming Hume has been

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the only writer to take notice of it (Smith, 1981: 412). That connection prominent in Hume, as we saw in Chapter 2, is a central theme of Smith’s work. Hume also had significant influence on James Steuart’s Principles of Political Oeconomy (Skinner, 2006). Although, contrary to Hume and Smith, Steuart retained a role for the intervention by a “statesman” (Steuart, 1966: I, 122) nonetheless he is indebted to Hume methodologically and subscribes to one of Hume’s basic tenets that “political oeconomy” should adapt to the “spirit, manners, habits and customs of the people” (1966: I, 16). Leaving aside the controversies stimulated by his skepticism and writings on religion (one of the motivating forces behind the Common Sense reaction but which did inspire one of the more thoughtful— as Hume himself acknowledged—critiques of his view of miracles [Campbell, 1762]), it is his History that caused the biggest stir. Not that these were unconnected. For example, Daniel MacQueen’s book length critique of the History was principally concerned with defending Protestantism against Hume’s identification of it with enthusiasm and fanaticism and countering Hume’s attempt “to resolve all piety into superstition or enthusiasm” with “loose and irreligious sneers” (MacQueen, 1756: 306, 327). When he does consider Hume’s political narrative he detects

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therein an “apology for the principles of arbitrary power” (1756: 254), albeit recognizing that other passages are “animated with the full spirit of liberty” (1756: 228) (Forbes, 1970: 37). This detection, as brought out in Chapter 1, is the gravamen of the charge that Hume’s History was “Tory.” For example, Catharine Macaulay’s very lengthy alternative History was written, as she said in her Introduction, with an “eye to public Liberty” and to do justice “to the memory of our illustrious ancestors” who set up “the banners of Liberty” against the “pretensions of the Stewarts” (Macaulay, 1769: viii–ix). In the book itself, when she cites Hume, he is frequently dubbed “judicious” or “ingenious” as when he is called to bear testament for those who could see something to support in Charles I (1769: III, 84). She sent a copy to Hume who replied that they differed less on the facts than on their interpretation, as, for example, over the legality of Elizabeth I’s actions (NL: 81). Perhaps the most intellectually grounded response was that offered by his fellow Scot, the Glasgow law professor John Millar (2006). Millar’s thought as a whole, however, is heavily, and openly, indebted to Hume and the differences are “academic” rather “ideological” (as we might say). Nonetheless such was the popularity of the History (especially when it was “extended” by Smollett) that it remained a standard

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text until well into nineteenth century and only went out of print in the last decade of that century (Phillipson, 1989: 139). One final aspect of Hume’s impact on British thought is his influence on Edmund Burke. Rather in the same way that Smith throws a shadow over developments in “liberal” political economy so does Burke’s retrospective salience colors the history of conservative thinking. The sources of Burke’s own thought are manifold but Hume is definitely a direct contributor. Some intimations of that contribution were supplied in Chapter 2, and Chapter 4 will consider thematically Hume’s place in conservative thinking and, in so doing, will identify his impact on Burke. Accordingly I will not pursue here this line of enquiry. However, it will be apt to say a brief word about William Paley. Paley was not especially original thinker but his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) was an immensely popular work. This popularity was principally attributable to his vindication or endorsement of “received wisdom.” Since Paley freely appropriated Hume’s views on, for example, the importance of expectation and confidence (Paley, 1845: 26), of custom (1845: 31), of opinion and prescription (1845: 100), of the undesigned development of the British constitution (1845: 115) then in this way Hume fed into a “conservative” stream of thought that flowed also indirectly into Burke.

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B North America Hume’s writings (with the usual exception of the Treatise) were well-known in America. However, since, in Gordon Wood’s phrase, the Americans “borrowed promiscuously” (1969: 14), it is difficult to disentangle Hume’s contribution from that of others. The dissemination of his works, and their impact, mirrored the British pattern—the Essays, the Enquiries, and then increasingly the History being the focus of attention, while his philosophical skepticism, and associated attack on religion, drew a predictable negative response (the Americans, by and large, aligning themselves with the Common Sense school of Reid). What, of course, gives an extra dimension to this attention is the political turmoil in the colonies and eventual war and independence. (Hume himself remarked that he was “an American in my principles” [L: II, 303; see Pocock, 1985; Livingston, 1990].) Against this background Hume’s “political” essays found an eager readership. His essay on “Of the Liberty of the Press,” for example, was reprinted in colonial newspapers (Spencer, 2002: I, 4). The footnote on “blacks” in “Of National Character” also, not surprisingly, was taken up, even being labeled “Mr Hume’s doctrine” (Spencer, 2002: I, 5n). Foreshadowing the basic issue of the relation between state and church, the essay “Of the Parties of Great

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Britain” with its identification of priestly power as a threat to liberty was picked up by John Adams in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765) (Bailyn, 1967: 97; cf. Hume E-PGB: 65). We know that Hume was eagerly and intelligently read by the leaders of the Revolution as they debated the proper characterization of a republic. These Americans could draw on a long tradition of republican theorizing, with its roots in Aristotle and Roman historians like Livy, then reborn with Machiavelli and other Italians and continued by seventeenth-century English scholars like James Harrington before continuations in the eighteenth century by Montesquieu and Rousseau. This is not a simple story and its various iterations produced amendments, a process to which Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and others contributed (Pocock, 1975). Hume’s place in this narrative is also not simple but many commentators identify his influence on the American expression (Elkins and McKitrick [1993]; Stourzh [1970]). His work is utilized pragmatically, so—for example—Hamilton can exploit Hume’s writings on trade and depart from him over the role of public credit (McNamara, 1998: 98). Nonetheless, a persistent strain is the appropriation from his Essays of Hume’s strong defense of commerce, with its attendant rejection of republican virtue based on a now outmoded agrarian “economy.” This defense is perhaps most apparent in the great

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“Federalist” debates over the nature and structure of the new republic. Hume’s essay on “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” has been claimed as the inspiration behind Madison’s famous 10th Federalist on “factions” and the superiority of a large over a small republic (Adair, 1957) and contended by others (Morgan, 1986). Regardless of that particular debate, there is a pervasive “Humean” flavor to many of the Federalist essays as they caution against a Jeffersonian “republicanism” (Manzer, 2001). Attributions of “influence” are notoriously difficult to pin down but when, for example, in the forty-ninth paper, it is argued that governments rest on opinion, especially those fortified by their antiquity, so that frequent recourse to the “people” is dangerous, then Hume’s uncited authority does seem to be present (Earle, 1941: 329). Indeed the anti-Jeffersonian tenor of the Federalist papers has caused them to be identified as embodying “moderate conservatism” (Viereck, 1965: 92). While allowing for Burke’s later influence, and for his own indebtedness to Hume, it is defensible (to put it no higher) that Hume had an impact on American conservative thought. In terms of actual citations it was Hume’s History that led the way. Symptomatically, it was the most frequently borrowed book from Harvard’s Library in the 1770s (Spencer, 2002: II, 4). It was seen to embody the history of “liberty” in the colonial motherland

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and thereby illustrated the illiberality of George III’s policies. But the History had an ambivalent reception, in as much as it was seen to be a bad influence on a new republic. Echoing the use made of Hume by Madison and others, it is perhaps no surprise to discover that Jefferson was particularly critical. This criticism was all the more vehement because of the elegance of Hume’s style which enabled its “errors & heresies” to be instilled “insensibly into the minds of unwary readers.” Jefferson himself acknowledged that he had enthusiastically devoured the book when he was young. Hume’s threat stemmed from the fact that his History insidiously “spread universal toryism over the land”—a judgment Jefferson reiterated in 1824 when he described Hume “as the great apostle of Toryism” (Jefferson, 1999: 274, 283, 383).

C Europe i France

We saw in Chapter 1 that Hume lived in France, once as a young man and later as a diplomat. In the latter role he met many of the leading French intellectuals. We also know from his correspondence that he took a close interest in the translation of his works. Mirroring the reception of his work in Britain and America it was his Essays and History that made the biggest impact and it is upon those that I will focus.

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The “economic” essays, published as the Political Discourses in 1752, made a significant impression, even if chiefly, as Franco Venturi says of their impact in Venice, they were a set of arguments on which others could project their preoccupations (Venturi, 1983: 354). The Discourses were translated three times in 1753, 1754 and again in 1767. The second of these by Jean-Bernard LeBlanc was the key one (Charles, 2008: 181). Le Blanc sent Hume a copy and they began a correspondence, though Hume laments delays in receiving it but which, when it did arrive, he judged “excellent” (L: I, 191, 197, 207, 225, 228). It was a bestseller and, abetted by the translator’s commentary, became a central text to internal debates about French commercial policy. Hume’s defense of commerce and luxury chimed with the policy advocated by a group associated with Vincent de Gournay, one of four Intendants of Trade. Hume’s argument was developed by, among others, François Forbonnais, who in his Éléments du Commerce (1754), labeled Hume a “major authority” (Charles, 2008: 194). Hume’s arguments were used in a sharp debate between the protagonists of “commerce,” like Forbonnais, and the Physiocrats (Hont, 2008: 267). The latter, in a testament to Hume’s standing, had to contest Hume’s argument, especially his defense of “luxury” (Shovlin, 2008: 205). LeBlanc alerted Hume that Victor Mirabeau, a leading Physiocrat, in his L’Ami des Hommes (1756)

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had included a criticism of Hume’s view (L: I, 159n). Hume in later correspondence to another French scholar (Morellet) made clear in vehement language his own opposition to the arguments of Physiocrats) (L: II, 205). Yet there is no easy “fit.” Hume’s view on the dangers of credit ran contrary to Forbonnais’s support of the credit system. Hence Mirabeau was able to mirror these concerns of Hume forcing Forbonnais to sideline them by identifying this strand of Hume as sample of English Tory antipathy to the credit system (Sonenscher, 1997: 95). Hume’s own involvement in print in these debates is minimal. He likely met some of the protagonists, such as Morellet, in the Paris salon of Julie de Lespinasse and, as we noted in Chapter 1, he corresponded with Turgot (who he probably met in Mme de Geoffrin’s salon [Dakin, 1939: 16]) on “economic” and other matters (Turgot wrote an Ê´ loge of Gournay). A less concrete line of Humean influence can be drawn through Turgot to Condorcet. While Condorcet was also a visitor to Lespinasse’s salon when Hume was in Paris it does not seem they met (Williams, 2004: 13). Among Condorcet’s many intellectual achievements and enterprises was an attempt to develop a conception of social science, a conception which the leading authority on Condorcet’s thought judges to rest at critical points on a Humean account of probability and belief (Baker, 1975: 138, 160). This intimates

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a later, if in the end not fruitful, career in Auguste Comte’s “positivism.” Comte judged that Hume’s work made a “great step,” albeit with “serious defects” (Comte, 1853: II, 428). Nonetheless despite the undoubted bizarre elements in Comte (Hume had a designated “day” in his Positive Calendar [Comte, 1966: 270]), Hume has been judged to be the “real father of positivist philosophy” (Kolakowski, 1972: 43). As we might now expect, Hume’s History also played a role in French debates. Leblanc who translated the Political Discourses also began to translate the History (and corresponded with Hume on the endeavor). As it turned out LeBlanc never completed the task and it was continued by the Abbé Prévost and appeared, as History of Stuarts, to great acclaim in 1760 (Bongie, 2000: 11). To some extent this acclamation built on the impact of his “economic” essays and the heterodoxy of his religious views. The latter had been abetted by the translation (likely by Holbach [Mossner, 1980: 330]) of two essays (“Of Suicide” and “Of the Immortality of the soul”) in 1770, although Hume himself had withdrawn them prior to a planned publication in 1755. The History itself fitted into a preexisting “anglophilia” in the thought of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment (the philosophes). This “love of the English” was not neutral but used by Montesquieu and Voltaire, especially, as a means of criticizing French institutions. Voltaire wrote a lengthy review of

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the History that he praised as “perhaps the best written in any language” (quoted in Bongie, 2000: 13). Voltaire deemed to judge Hume’s work as impartial but, like the Discourses, it soon became embroiled in debate. This intensified over the subsequent years until, by the time of the Revolution, Hume’s reading of the Stuarts (including, of course, the contentiously legal execution of a monarch) was cited widely on all sides. Laurence Bongie (2000: 90), from an examination of the counter-revolutionary literature, estimates that until the turn of the century, Hume’s impact was greater than Burke’s. This use of Hume’s account prompted attacks upon him as a “conservative.” Catherine Macaulay’s “liberal” counterhistory was translated and Honoré Mirabeau in a Preliminary Discourse singled out Hume’s narrative as effectively counseling acquiescence to “bad” government (Bongie, 2000: 135). This intensity inevitably abated, and though Burke’s version began to achieve its current status as the antirevolutionary tract, yet Hume’s work continued to be cited. Joseph de Maistre, the intellectually most accomplished, as well as most partisan, critic of the Revolution provided in his Conside. rations sur la France a chapter that comprised solely of a lengthy digest of citations from the History of “le sage Hume” (1797: 94n, 217–50). But de Maistre also saw in Hume that in spite of (or because of) his great

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talent he was the “most dangerous” critic of established order (de Maistre, 1965: 240, 263). This latter aspect, in particular Hume’s anticlericalism, found an echo in the work of Benjamin Constant, the most notable “liberal” thinker of the era, who not only was indebted to Hume’s “natural history” account of polytheism but who also drew on the importance of “opinion” (Fontana, 1991: 96, 109).

ii Italy

Hume’s penetration into Italy is effectively an offshoot of the career of his work in France. A long review of LeBlanc’s translation was published in the Novelle Letterarie in Florence in 1755 (Tarabuzzi, 1980: 392). Robert Adam, who was in Rome at the time, reported on the “great repute” of the Essays and History (Mossner, 1980: 228) and, we know, that his work was also known in Venice (Hume received a book from Count Algarotti, “a famous Virtuoso” of the republic [L: I, 239]). It is a mark of Hume’s presence in Italy that his work was put on the Index of banned books in 1761. An Italian translation of the economic essays (Saggi Politici) was published in Venice in 1767, although the translator (Matteo Dandolo) had sent Hume a copy as early as 1762 (Tarbuzzi, 1980: 398). Dandolo was motivated by the realization that Venetian power was now limited and needed the implementation of

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Humean prescriptions to invigorate it. This same context was evident in the work of the Neapolitan economist, Antonio Genovesi who followed Hume’s defense of luxury, drawing on the History as well as the Essays (Genovesi, 1977: 133–64). A somewhat similar story can be told about Hume in Milan, the other chief site of the Enlightenment in Italy. Cesare Beccaria’s views on luxury bear the hallmarks of his knowledge of the History—in a letter of 1766 he stated that it was the work of “political thinker, a philosopher and a historian of the first order” (quoted in Camcastle, 2008: 3). Though there is no direct evidence of Beccaria having read the “economic” essays, it is those, especially those expounding the role of luxury and commerce that called forth comment (though not always acknowledged) by Pietro Verri (Verri, 1998: 54). Hume’s philosophy was discussed in a correspondence between Pietro and his brother Alessandro (Mazza, 2005). Alessandro traveled to London in 1766 where he hoped to meet Hume but by then Hume was back in Edinburgh. The Hume–Rousseau dispute made its impression with the brothers taking different “sides,” Alessandro Hume’s while Pietro sympathized more with Rousseau (Mazza, 2005: 228). iii Germany

The incursion of Hume’s thought into “Germany” is typically judged one of the most momentous in the

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history of philosophy. It was the reading of a translation of the First Enquiry that caused Kant to awake from what he called his “dogmatic slumber” (Kant, 1949: 45). The consequence of this reveille was his self-identified Copernican Revolution (Kant, 1929: 22). This “Revolution” reversed the relation between subject and object. For Kant, “knowledge” was not attained from exposure to a conceptually prior objective experiential world but was only possible because of the conceptually prior Categories (such as causation) that the subject necessarily had to employ to make experience knowable. Though epochal, Kant’s reaction to Hume far from exhausted his impact in Germany and, in a tactic not dissimilar to the use made of his work by anti-Enlightenment scholars in France, Hume’s thought was used by a group of anti-Enlightenment critics led by Hamann and Jacobi. Isaiah Berlin aptly remarks that Hume’s thought underwent a “metamorphosis” in their hands (Berlin, 1977: 112). They took Hume’s skepticism, and the pivotal role played by “belief” in his philosophy, to affirm the centrality and ineradicability of “faith.” It was not that Hamann was ignorant of Hume’s position but he used the ambivalence between “belief” and “faith” (Glaube) for his own critique of rationalism (Tokiwa, 1999). This continued after Kant’s philosophical response. Hamann wrote to Herder that compared to Kant “Hume was always my man” (in Smith, 1960: 244).

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Hamann could read English and began a translation of the Dialogues of Natural Religion. Herder paraphrased the Natural History (Herder, 1891: vol. 23, pp. 195–7) but Herder is especially notable for a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment view of history and human nature (Berry, 1982: chapter 2) and Hume (along with Voltaire, Robertson and others) is a subject of criticism (Herder, 1891: vol. 5, pp. 508ff.). Hume’s own History was translated in 1762 and other versions appeared throughout the century. It was admired but the burgeoning of German historical thinking after Herder’s critique, supplemented by the response to the French Revolution, meant it was Burke’s supposed “organicism” that dominated the field (Meinecke, 1970: 100–1). Even the classical (as they are now regarded) German historians Niebuhr and Ranke while respectful of Hume’s qualities as a historian were critical of his approach (Meinecke, 1972: 184–5). Compared to elsewhere Hume’s “economic” writings made less stir in Germany where a tradition of “cameralism” prevailed, which, like Steuart’s approach (influential in Germany), was less favorable to the basic “free trade” message Hume was seen to advocate. It has frequently been remarked that Hume’s posthumous reception and influence has been transformed. As the brief survey here has indicated his most immediate impact was made by his Essays and,

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perhaps above all, by the History, hence the often cited fact that Hume’s presence in the Catalogue of the British Library, identifies him as “David Hume, historian.” The latter half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of Hume as one of a relatively select band of philosophers of world-historical significance. While much of this acclaim has derived from his discussion in Book 1 of the Treatise, this recognition has led to a fresh look at his political thought, in the wide sense of encompassing his economics and moral philosophy. In the concluding Chapter, I examine one manifestation of this interest in Hume’s political thought—his position in the history of conservative thought.

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4

Hume and Conservatism

I opened Chapter 2 by declaring that Hume was not a conservative and I closed that chapter with some remarks suggesting that Hume’s thought was distinct from post-Enlightenment (post-French Revolution) conservatism. The suffix “ism” indicates that it is only from that period that a conservative ideology could be thought to exist—just as in the same way, and at the same time, “liberalism” emerged (as indeed did the word “ideology” itself) and thus to apply it to Hume is anachronistic (Whelan, 1985: 325; Miller, 1981: 187). Nonetheless, Hume has been enlisted as an exponent of conservative ideology or—for those who dislike that term—a conservative outlook (Whelan), attitude (Hailsham [1959]), or disposition (Oakeshott [1991], Brennan and Hamlin [2004]) and/or as a member of what can be called the conservative “tradition.” Historically religion whether as an institution, a practice, or a theology has played a prominent role in the articulation of conservatism. Given Hume’s antipathy to religion, even as selectively sketched out in

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Chapter 2 (which excluded his effective dismissal of tenable belief in miracles and his most famous critique of the Design argument in his posthumous Dialogues), he can be assigned no role in the formulation of a religion-based conservatism. However, it is reasonable to say that this dimension is now less salient, while not altogether absent. This relative de-emphasis has opened some “space” for the identification of a Humean “contribution” to contemporary conservative thinking. Sheldon Wolin marked this by characterizing Hume’s conservatism “analytical” rather than “metaphysical” (1954: 1015) and Muller by declaring Hume’s thought was a “watershed” in the development of a secular conservative doctrine (1997: 24). Wolin’s distinction is indicative of the perceived need to impart greater precision into what with deliberate vagueness I termed “conservative thinking.” Accordingly, it is to be expected that in a search for precision its analysts and commentators have endeavored to identify a core or, more loosely, what Muller characterizes as “a constellation of recurrent assumptions, themes and images” (1997: 23). Hence, Kirk (1960: chapter 1) identifies six “canons” of conservative thought; Allen (1981) articulates a “configuration” of modern conservative ideas that has seven elements; Hearnshaw (1933) outlines 12 “principles” of conservatism; O’Sullivan (1976) and Quinton (1978) both characterize it as a “politics of imperfection” and, as

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final illustrations, Huntingdon (1957) and Mannheim (1953) both treat conservatism as an “ideology.” What is implied in these various endeavors is some idea of coherence, some criteria by which to include certain ideas/thinkers in the conservative “camp” and simultaneously also to exclude some ideas/thinkers from membership. If such criteria can be established then, it might be argued, Hume’s relation thereto can be plotted and his contribution to current conservative thinking assessed. While I will, in what follows, adopt in part a version of this strategy, I do not seek to match his thought against some preestablished criteria. Aside from that procedure potentially imposing too rigid a structure, it runs the risk of conflating two different perspectives. Without straying too far into methodological minefields, it can defensibly be the case that Hume’s own conception of his thought and the use made of that thought are two different things (as Hamann and Maistre exemplify—see Chapter 3). Similarly, enlisting Hume as a significant contributor to conservatism need not claim that this is a historically attuned exegesis of his thought. In what follows I summarily identify aspects of contemporary secular conservatism that seem most open to being read or informed by Humean insights and arguments. To simplify this task I adopt, in a similar summary fashion, Michael Oakeshott and Friedrich Hayek as exemplars. I should acknowledge Hayek

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does have an ambiguous relation to conservatism. He explicitly denies that he is a conservative (1960: 397– 411). The root of that denial is his rejection of its negativity; conservatism’s inability in his eyes to offer an alternative direction to socialism. That alternative is liberalism, though because of that term’s ambiguity Hayek has a preference for “old Whig.” Hayek identifies Hume as a crucial exponent of that alternative, indeed he declares that Hume’s was “probably the only comprehensive statement of the legal and political philosophy which later became known as liberalism” (1968: 340). Hayek does allow that this Humean liberalism shares with conservatism a distrust of reason and a recognition of the role of nonrational institutions and practices or habits (1960: 406). Gissurarson (1987) coined the term “conservative liberalism” to characterize Hayek’s position and should a label be thought helpful then, given Hayek’s own explicit “Humeanism,” it could by extension be held to characterize Hume’s own position, as O’Sullivan does with his almost identical term “liberal-conservative” (1976: 138). We can set the scene, as it were, by picking up Hayek’s reference to reason. It is a persistent theme in conservative thinking that it distrusts “reason” and excoriates “rationalism.” One of the key leitmotifs in Hayek’s writings is a critique of a particular species of rationalism that he labels “constructivism” and he

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consistently and persistently identifies Hume, and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, as precursors and as exponents of an alternative notion of rationalism that he labels, following Karl Popper, “evolutionary” or “critical” rationalism. He characterizes constructivism as “a conception which assumes that all social institutions are, and ought to be, the product of deliberate design” with the consequence that it also claims that “the fact that an institution exists is evidence of its having been created for a purpose and always that we should so re-design society and institutions that all our actions will be wholly guided by known purposes” (1982: I, 5, 8–9). Against this, the “evolutionist” view is that the social practices and institutions that constitute the orderliness of society, and into which individuals are born, have prevailed because they made the group successful but these practices were not initially adopted because it was known they would bring about desired effects (1982: I, 17). The “rules of conduct” that constitute the practices have, for Hayek, two features— they manifest themselves in regularity of action which can be described without the actor being able to state explicitly what they are and, second, the rules are observed because they, in fact, give the group superior strength but, again, this is not because that is an effect known to those who are guided by them (1982: I, 19).

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Oakeshott in a series of essays, written in the 1950s, developed a critique of “rationalism in politics” (1991). The “rationalist,” as thus depicted, has a disposition of enmity to authority, to prejudice and to the “merely traditional, customary or habitual,” so that “to form a habit” is thought be a failure (1991: 6, 7). This can be contrasted to the conservative disposition which is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. (1991: 408)

These two dispositions produce two different conceptions of knowledge. The rationalist subscribes to “technical” knowledge, which is characterized by formulation into rules, as—to give one of his favorite examples—the technique of cookery is contained in the cookery book. The other conception he labels “practical” knowledge. This exists only in use and cannot be formulated into rules—what makes a good cook cannot be encapsulated in a text, which is nothing other than an abstract of someone’s practical knowledge (1991: 520). Technical knowledge can be learnt but practical knowledge is rather imparted and

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acquired, as by being an apprentice chef in the kitchen (1991: 15). Because the latter involves the mastery of a skill, is something acquired in use over time, then Oakeshott says it can be also be called “traditional knowledge” (1991: 12). This links it to the conservative disposition because a skill, as in the use of a tool, being nothing other than the embodiment of familiarized practice, is acquired through time/tradition (1991: 419). For Oakeshott these two forms or conceptions are inseparable but the rationalist, in his construction, does not recognize practical knowledge as “knowledge” because it defies formulation or a reduction to certain and self-complete instructions (1991: 16). From this cursory summary, there is a clear affinity between Hayek’s constructivist and Oakeshott’s rationalist. This is not to say Hayek and Oakeshott are in full and entire agreement, though they were aware of similarities in their views and corresponded (Smith, 2006: 186). They differ, for example, in their reading of Hobbes and Burke. Also Oakeshott characterizes Hayek’s most famous book, The Road to Serfdom (1991), as ideological and thus “infected” like all contemporary politics with rationalism (Oakeshott, 1991: 21). Notwithstanding these points their affinity is evident when it is appreciated that both identify the same exemplars of these rationalist/constructivist traits. For both, Descartes stands at the fount of this view of

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reason as manifest, for example, in the work of Bentham and advocates progress in the manner of Helvetius or Godwin as well as, and above all, in socialist ideology. Similarly Hayek’s evolutionary knowledge is aligned to Oakeshott’s traditional knowledge. Hayek is clear that Hume is an “evolutionist,” while Oakeshott, who is generally less forthcoming with named exponents, does acknowledge Hume as one of those writers from whom one can learn about the conservative disposition (1991: 435). Judged against this pedigree, Hume is not a Cartesian rationalist. For him, reason “is the discovery of truth and falsehood” (T 3-1-1.9) and for that alone is it equipped. This limitation means that it does not apply to “actions,” which are the work of the passions (as indicated in Chapter 2; Hume considers reason inert). This makes him critical of rationalist philosophers who extend reason’s role, who believe it is possible to arrive at demonstrative conclusions in the operation of common life. His target is a type of moral philosopher who affirms that “virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation . . .” (T 3-1-1.4). While this critique would apply to certain types of Natural Lawyer (such as Grotius who argues for the demonstrative certitude of true

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justice) Hume does not, in his texts, make this an explicit engagement. This critique of rationalism is definitionally precise and, as such, might be thought to contribute little distinctiveness to a conservative case. However, a more substantive contribution might be identified from the fact that against the demonstrativeness of reason Hume upholds a skeptical stance. Almost invariably when analysts of conservatism invoke Hume (as they invariably do) they cite his skepticism as a justification of the invocation, with Whelan’s account the most nuanced and sophisticated (1985: chapter 5). Skepticism, it is frequently claimed, corrodes the certainty that possesses those who wish not to conserve the status quo but replace it by (in their eyes) something better. This skepticism then leads to something approaching an Oakeshottian disposition to prefer the familiar, the tried and the actual and Oakeshott himself, in a posthumously published work, referred to the “sceptical style” of politics (of which he identifies Hume as an exponent) as one that is concerned to draw attention to the values of “civil order and tranquillitas” (1993: 81). We did indeed in Chapter 2 quote passages from Hume that reflect that disposition, as when he express alarm at radical change and exhibits a distaste for political zeal. Hume does call himself an exponent of “mitigated scepticism” and thinks this approach can

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instill a “modesty and reserve” into those (“the greater part of mankind”) who exhibit a dogmatic one-sidedness in their views (U 12.24). It can also wean our minds “from all those prejudices which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion” (U 12.4). But, as we also saw in Chapter 2, Hume considers it a central role of the science of man to challenge and overturn superstition. Such a programme sits oddly with a claim that his skepticism induces acquiescence tout court. Indeed Hume distinguishes his skepticism from its extreme form (which he calls Pyrrhonian) because that would undermine the intelligibility of a science of man (which includes politics) and thus his attempt to put “a compleat system of the sciences” on an “almost entirely new” foundation (T Introd.: 6). That this reposes on probability [T 1-4-1.4 et passim], not demonstration, does not, in wider or nontechnical sense, amount to a derogation of “reason” (Norton, 1982). Indeed Hume is not anti-intellectual; he recurrently defends the “philosopher” or “abstruse” reasoner against vulgar and shallow thinkers, for example, in E-Com: 254; U 8.13; T 1-3-13.12. Philosophically Hume’s “disposition” is anything but “conservative.” Donald Livingston, however, does hold that Hume’s thought expresses “the philosophical core of the conservative intellectual tradition” (Livingston, 1995: 156). Livingston’s broad argument is that Hume’s conservatism reposes on a radical

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critique of (false) philosophy and a rejection of what Livingston calls “the autonomy principle” (Livingston, 1984: 23), of which (once again) the Cartesian method is the prime example. But he does observe that this critique is only an intimation of a later (postFrench Revolution) structure of thought (Livingston, 1995: 152). What Livingston does regard as central to this intimation is an interpretation of common life as “custom.” Although Livingston never cites them, this allies his argument with Hayek and Oakeshott’s alternative to constructivism and technique. The role played by custom and habit in Hume’s thought does bring us to that aspect of his writing that does seem to comport best with conservatism. Nevertheless some care is needed. We noted in Chapter 2 his declaration that habit was the cement of the universe. That declaration reflected his analysis of causality and the centrality he apportions to it. This, however, is so fundamental or universal that it applies as equally to the “operations of the sun and climate” as it does to “human actions” (T 2-3-1.19). Accordingly, to focus more particularly on the latter, in order to identify any specific “political” application of this underlying generality requires a consideration of what Oakeshott for his part calls a “practice,” which he formally identifies as “a set of considerations, manners, uses, observances, customs, standards, canons, maxims, principles, rules and offices specifying useful

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procedures or denoting obligations or duties which relate to human actions and utterances” (Oakeshott, 1975: 55). Oakeshott further characterizes practices as “footprints left behind by agents responding to their emergent situations” (1975: 100) and, leaving aside Hume’s almost identical metaphor in “Of the Original Contract” [quoted above in p. 64], Hume’s account of conventions or artifices can be read as exemplification of this characterization. If we revisit his account of justice we can see how this reading has some plausibility. According to Hume, humans are confronted with an “unnatural conjunction of infirmity and of necessity” (T 3-2-2.2), that is, of the “concurrence” of their limited generosity and the scarcity, relative to their wants, of “external objects” (T 3-2-2.16). To this predicament they have contrived a solution through the artifice of the three rules of justice. There are two points of current moment here. First this is indeed a contrivance; in contrast to the situation of other animals, there is no “natural” solution to the predicament. Second, this contrivance is not the product of reason or discovery of relations of ideas that are “eternal, immutable and universally obligatory” (T 3-2-2.20). Instead Hume invokes (proleptically) the emergence of an Oakeshottian “practice” or Hayekian non-deliberative “rules” or “forms of conduct” (1960: 27).

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The most celebrated example of this invocation is his account of the emergence of the convention of stable possession (T 3-2-2.10). Its roots are propositions derived “experimentally” from “cautious observation of human life” (T Introd.: 10) and, as such, are consonant with the causes of the predicament to which they offer a solution. Hence two individuals each observe that it is in their individual interest to leave the other in possession of their goods and when this common sense of interest is known it may “properly enough be call’d a convention or agreement” (T 3-3-2.10). This is manifest in action and not in an act of mind like a promise (a later convention) as each party acts on the supposition that the other will act similarly. In this way, Hume maintains, stability of possession “arises gradually and acquires force by slow progression and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it.” Though Hume does not in this passage refer to “habit,” it is clearly no distortion to refer to this process as one of habituation. The appropriateness of that terminology is reinforced by Hume’s elaboration. He proceeds to observe that this acquired experience “assures us still more” that the interest has become “common among our fellows” and this (in a phrase that we quoted in Chapter 2) “gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct.” And he concludes the paragraph by supplying two other

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telling examples—this same process is how languages are “gradually established” and how “gold and silver become the common measures of exchange.” To these examples we can add his account of the origin of government, where (we recall also from Chapter 2) it commences casually and imperfectly to meet the exigencies of warfare (Oakeshott’s “emergent situations”) and the habit of obedience gradually (as Oakeshottian “footprints”) establishes the chieftain’s authority. For the purposes of this discussion, what makes Hume’s account of the establishment of government, property rules, language and money so telling is that it exemplifies several recurrent features of conservative thinking—the stress on continuity, on gradualism and the maintenance of order, on functionality, on concreteness and on the limitations of reason. These features are interlinked but it will be useful to say something about each in turn and schematically link their presence in Hume to expressions in Burke, as the defining voice in the conservative political tradition, and to their manifestation in the contemporary work of Hayek and Oakeshott. “Continuity” speaks to the fact that humans are born into ongoing communities—families, Völker, states (Berry, 1983). As institutions these communities embody values and norms of conduct. No individual is ever in position to “stand outside” their time and

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place. As Chapter 2 sought to bring out, the process of socialization plays a key role in Hume. As he says appositely in his critique of contract theory, that argument supposes humans are like “silk-worms and butterflies” whereby one generation goes “off the stage at once, and another succeed” (E-OC: 476). This presages Burke’s similar entomological metaphor whereby the “rationalism” of “sophisters, economists and calculators” assumes humans are “little better than flies of a summer” (Burke, 1987: 66, 83). This passage from Burke precedes the most famous statement of continuity in conservative thought—society as a “partnership not only between those are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born” (Burke, 1987: 85). In the modern idiom of Oakeshott and Hayek continuity is captured in their references to “tradition.” In Oakeshott it can be seen in the apprentice who acquires the skill to cook from assimilating a preexistent practice and who is able, subsequently, to impart it to the next generation of apprentices. For Hayek it is a basic proposition that “our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools and our institutions” are “adaptations to past experience” that as “forms of conduct” comprise “what we call ‘traditions’ ” (Hayek, 1960: 26–7). “Gradualism” and its associated idea of order is an obvious corollary of this understanding of tradition. Conservatives do not reject change but they are

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resolutely opposed to radical, revolutionary, or violent change. This opposition rests on the contention that revolution dangerously upsets an order established gradually over time—the balance arrived at between liberty and authority as Hume puts it. For the conservative, “real change” is evolutionary, and it is in this espousal of gradualism that the conservative stress on habit and custom is evident. As we have already indicated, this is a central plank in Hume’s social theory. His narrative of the growth of liberty in England that we rehearsed in Chapter 2 is a clear case in point and his Essays recur frequently to the power of habit as when it consolidates the chieftain’s power (see E-OG: 39). To equal and consequential effect Hume thinks that to attempt to shortcut or accelerate this gradual process is to court disaster; there is “not a more terrible event than a total dissolution of government” and “violent innovations” are “dangerous” as “more ill than good” is to expected from them (E-OC: 472, 477). The danger is that because of their lack of gradualism these violent innovators imperil the stability of the social order. The reason why Burke is the founding father of conservatism is because of his asseveration that “to make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding” (Burke, 1987: 147). One of his central criticisms of “radical thinkers” is that they ignore the crucial

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cumulative effect of time by decrying prescription when, in a passage which replicates a key argument in Hume (see p. 66 above), it is prescription “which through long usage mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement” (1987: 145). For Hayek it is axiomatic that social change is evolutionary and he praises Hume’s History fulsomely as an interpretation of English history as “the gradual emergence of the Rule of Law” (Hayek, 1978: 124). Even Oakeshott’s conservative for whom change has to be suffered nevertheless believes that “the more closely an innovation resembles growth (i.e., the more clearly it is intimated in and not merely imposed upon the situation) the less likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss” and “favours a slow rather than a rapid pace” (Oakeshott, 1991: 172). This preference reflects the recognition that habit is the “unselfconscious following of a tradition of moral behaviour” (1991: 35). The persistence of order implicit in gradual continuity warrants the presumption that current institutions and norms are extant because they work, have utility, or are functional. They are tested and thus, the conservative claims, are to be valued. In Hume this is central to the necessity of justice in the maintenance of systemic social stability. The miser should inherit because the function of property rules is to sustain, through their inflexibility, expectations and

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confidence in future regularity. We know from experience this redounds to “public utility”; if the “distinction and separation of possessions [were] entirely useless” then that convention would never have arisen (M 3.47). In Burke, this functionalism is captured in his phrase “old establishments are tried by their effects” (Burke, 1987: 151). The happiness and wealth of a people are testament to the fact that these establishments (institutions) work. For Hayek this functionalism is basic to his evolutionary account of rationality. The “cultural heritage into which man is born” comprising those rules of conduct are adaptations that have prevailed because they were successful (Hayek, 1982: I, 17). We have already noted that Oakeshott’s conservative prefers the tried to the untried (Oakeshott, 1991: 408). In similar fashion, routines are all the more useful the more familiar they are, as they serve to “establish and satisfy expectations” (1991: 421). Characteristically, perhaps, in Oakeshott the force of this is negative—the familiar, whatever it is, has value because it is too disruptive to amend (Knowles, 2000; Brennan and Hamlin, 2004). By “concreteness” I mean the conservative sensitivity to actual situations, and response of specific groups of humans to them, as well as a distrust of hypothetical abstraction. This appreciation of the concrete leads to a tendency toward particularism in conservative

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thought (and thus in some guise to an affinity with nationalism). On this specific point Hume is an uncertain fellow-traveler. He has no time for any valorization of local superstitions when set against the findings of the science of man. But more generally Hume does recognize that humans act in concrete circumstances. We can again illustrate this recognition by his account of the accretion of power by a chieftain. The Contractarian account that there was an original compact that was “expressly formed for general submission” (something “beyond the comprehension of savages”) is unsustainable in the face of the experiential observation that “each exertion of authority in the chieftain must have been particular; and called forth by the present exigencies of the case” (E-OC: 468–9). Moreover he chides Contractarians for being “reasoners” who have not looked “abroad in the world” but who have, instead, articulated a “refined and philosophical a system” to which “nothing in the least corresponds” (E-OC: 470). Burke, for his part, employs Hume’s terminology to identify government (civil society) as an “offspring of convention” and a “contrivance” to provide for “human wants” that serves to restrain their passions. These restrictions, he goes on, “vary with times and circumstances and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing

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is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle” (Burke, 1987: 52–3). For Hayek, as we have seen, it is a major failing of constructivism that it assumes institutions have been deliberately designed when what humans actually do is “try to improve bit by bit on a process of mutually adjusting individual activities,” there is “always a definite problem to solve” (Hayek, 1978: 11). The solutions that “work” are those that persist and form the stuff of evolved traditions. We have already quoted Oakeshott’s reference to “emergent situations” and his “conservative” will have “nothing to do with innovations designed to meet merely hypothetical situations” (Oakeshott, 1991: 431). This emphasis on “the concrete” is central to his critique of the rationalist recourse to political ideology understood as an abstraction (or abridgement [1991: 4]) that has been “independently premeditated” to supply “ in advance of the activity of attending to the arrangements of society a formulated end to be pursued” (1991: 116). Whereas “actually” “political activity is the ‘amendment of existing arrangements by exploring and pursuing what is intimated in them’ ” (1991: 125, 133; 1993: 35). And contrary to the rationalist ideologue, who deals only in the politics of perfection and uniformity, what he calls the “politics of faith” (as the abstract counterpart to the “politics of scepticism” [Oakeshott, 1993: 23]),

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these “arrangements” are as circumstantial and as varied as the “traditional manner of behaviour” they embody (Oakeshott, 1991: 5–6, 123). We have already when setting the scene referred to the conservative critique of reason (constructivism and “technique”) but there are two special additional emphases worth noting. First, this critique emphasizes the “law of unintended consequences.” This “law” is a combination of an experientially warranted observation that change leads to unanticipated outcomes, with the inference that it is thus an error to assume that what has happened was intended to happen, and an admonition that “designing” outcomes is dangerous as well as hubristic. Hayek makes this central to his whole social philosophy. He is very fond of quoting the remark of Adam Ferguson, Hume’s contemporary and compatriot, that institutions are the product of human action not design (Ferguson, 1966: 122) and links this to the idea of “spontaneous order” (Hayek, 1982: I, chapter 2). As an example Hayek cites Hume’s account of the emergence of language and money as an illustration of an endogenously grown order that was not deliberately invented (Hayek, 1968: 347). In Chapter 2 we quoted from the Treatise Hume’s comment that the rules that determine “property, right and obligation” though “advantageous to the public” were “not intended for that purpose by the inventor” (T 3-2-6.6). While

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Burke recognizes this he places it in a Providential framework—there is a “higher” intention at work than is apparent to mere humans. But in Oakeshott’s secular conservatism—and without it possessing Hayekian salience—this dimension to the critique of rationalism is also articulated. Indeed he is categorical that “total change is always more extensive than the change designed” and draws a series of conservative morals from the point. These include, as we have already noted, that the pace of change should be slow rather than rapid and also—this time picking up the conservative dispositional preference for the concrete—that innovation which is a “response to some specific defect” is more desirable than one designed generally to improve the human condition (Oakeshott, 1991: 411–12). The second emphasis in conservative antirationalism is the recognition of the limits of reason and thus of the unattainability of “perfection.” These limits are identified variously but each of the earlier characterizations—tradition, gradualism, functionality, concreteness—contribute. There is no blank sheet on which humans can write and which script can, if “irrational” obstacles are removed, be put into effect; rather, we operate and think (reason) in an inherited, complex, concrete context. Leaving aside Hume’s technical use of “reason,” we came across his recognition of these limits in, for example, his view

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that edicts to restrict consumption behavior were ineffective, that a Spartan regime was contrary to the grain of human nature as well as the crucial role he sees habit playing in social life. “Human nature,” he says, has “incurable” weakness (E-OG: 38). This sensitivity to imperfection is why commentators such as O’Sullivan and Quinton enlist Hume in the conservative camp and, more dramatically, it is Hume’s “paura della perfezione” that for Giarrizzo gives the particular hue to his conservatism (Giarrizzo, 1962: 48). And arguably it is of a piece with this identification of “weakness” that leads Hume to emphasize “authority” and to his “conservative” distrust of (rational) thinkers who would publicly articulate the “right” to dissent. This last point is one of Burke’s chief accusations against Richard Price and all other advocates of natural rights, whose “abstract perfection is their practical defect” (Burke, 1987: 52)—a defect made bloodily evident in the Revolution. We have already drawn attention to Hayek’s critique of constructivism, with the corollary, as repeatedly argues, that the complexity of a spontaneously evolved order far exceeds the rational capacity of individuals, and to how Oakeshott associates rationalism with the politics of perfection and “faith.” One claim that Oakeshott makes is that to be a “conservative in politics” is not inconsistent with being “radical in respect of almost every other activity”

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(1991: 423, 435). The final issue I wish to address in this selective survey of the Humean contribution is to focus on the “political.” There is in fact little here in Hume that is intellectually distinctive. The basic conservative stance is that politics is limited but this is animated by a rejection of more expansive conceptions of politics (role of “the state” in the economy, in welfare, and so on) that long post-date Hume. The contemporary conservative conceives of “limits” in two ways. First political “activity” itself is confined to “ruling” construed to refer to the exercise of public authority; it is not, it follows, properly understood as ubiquitous. Second, ruling itself is limited to the promulgation, and administration, of general rules. Both Oakeshott and Hayek espouse these positions. The former distinguishes a “civil association,” which is a formal relationship around the recognition of rules, from an “enterprise” association, which comprises individuals in a substantive relationship to satisfy “chosen wants” (Oakeshott, 1975: 121). For the latter there is a fundamental difference between end-independent rules of just conduct and the end-dependent rules of an “organization” (Hayek, 1982: II, 31 et passim). For both thinkers it is no proper task of politics/ government to implement distributive or social justice. This conservative “reining-in” of politics is indistinguishable from a “classical liberal” (Hayek’s old Whig) position. Accordingly when Hayek quotes

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Hume approvingly for his recognition that “we must proceed by general rules” (Hayek, 1982: II, 1; Hume T 3-2-10.3), this does not speak to his influence on conservatism. It should be acknowledged that this view of conservative politics does not sit easily with another conservative strand. Whereas Hayek and Oakeshott represent a “neutral” view (Oakeshott indeed uses the term “umpire” [Oakeshott, 1991: 427]), this other strand adopts a “perfectionist” perspective. This viewpoint thinks a government should conserve what is valuable; should deliberately and selectively foster and protect what it deems is under threat from current social “forces.” For T. S. Eliot a “governing elite” should protect the means that are “most favourable to the growth and survival of a superior culture” (Eliot, 1962: 108). For Roger Scruton the conservative recognizes that the “ ‘value-free’ world is not a human world” (Scruton, 1980: 141) and in his construction of that world he attributes to the conservative the view that the individual sees himself as part of an order that transcends anything he could himself enact (1980: 66). From this the conservative deems it proper to underwrite institutions—family, inheritance, religion—that embody that transcendence. Apart from his passing comments on Church/State relations Hume has little to say on this. He does express, as might be expected from an eighteenth-century

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author, “elitist” views on aesthetic judgment; to appreciate “good art” is an act of connoisseurship. The “generality of men,” because they lack the resources to devote time to acquiring the appropriate aesthetic skills, are unqualified to “give judgment on any work of art” whereas connoisseurs (not Hume’s term) do have the wherewithal to sustain prolonged exposure to art so that they acquire their informed expertise (E-ST: 241). One additional aspect of Hume’s thought is pertinent. His argument that government rests on “opinion” is resonant of a frequently articulated conservative perspective, albeit not one unique to that outlook. Hayek on at least a couple of occasions cites this argument both times to endorse what he takes to be its thrust. He links “opinion” with an evolved “grown” order (in contrast to “will” which he associates with a constructivist “made” order) (Hayek, 1978: 83) and later affirms that “the basic source of social order” is the “existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong” (Hayek, 1982: III, 33) and this applies to dictators as much as any other form of authority (1982: I, 92). This echoes Hume’s dictum that opinion not force (or coercion) underpins “the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular” (E-FPG: 32). While Oakeshott does not cite Hume (he is never expansive on that front but see

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Letwin [1975] for an Oakeshottian reading of Hume), this Humean insight is clearly discernible. He declares that à propos the “disposition to be conservative in respect of government” (to implement rules of conduct) then it “rests upon the acceptance of the current activities and beliefs of its subjects” (Oakeshott, 1991: 429). In his later more formal account Oakeshott, while eschewing the “psychological” language of opinion and belief, still affirms that the authority of what he terms “respublica” (the public concerns of a civil association) is not to be understood in terms of power (Oakeshott, 1975: 148–52). I conclude by returning to an earlier point. This reconstruction of a Humean contribution is distinct from an interpretation of his thought as conservative. I hope I have demonstrated through this reconstruction why Hume’s thought has indeed been frequently read as a contributor or progenitor of conservatism. It is equally the case that writing before and after the 1789 French Revolution makes a significant difference to how conservative thought developed, a point borne out by the universal recognition of Burke as the key formative thinker. As we have seen in this chapter Burke does draw on Hume but, as noted at the end of Chapter 2, and the tenor of that chapter as a whole, there are deep differences between them.

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It is my contention that the profundity of those differences, together with the circumstances and motivations of Hume’s philosophy, mean that in the round his own thought is misconstrued as conservative. But even if that is true, as this chapter has aimed to indicate, it does not follow, to repeat, that, he cannot be seen to have contributed to the developed articulation of conservatism.

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Bibliography Hume’s Works DP A Dissertation on the Passions (2007 [1757]). Ed. by T. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, cited by page. E Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1985). Ed. by E. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Essays in this edition are individually identified and cited by page as follows: E-AS Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences [1742] E-BG Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic [1741] E-BT Of the Balance of Trade [1752] E-CL Of Civil Liberty [1741] E-Com Of Commerce [1752] E-EW Of Essay Writing [1741] E-FPG Of the First Principles of Government [1741] E-Int Of Interest [1752] E-IP Of the Independency of Parliament [1741] E-IPC Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth [1752] E-JT Of the Jealousy of Trade [1758] E-Life My Own Life [1777] E-LP Of the Liberty of the Press [1741] E-Mon Of Money [1752] E-NC Of National Characters [1748]

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E-OC Of the Original Contract [1748] E-OG Of the Origin of Government [1777] E-PAN Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations [1752] E-PC Of Public Credit [1752] E-PD Of Polygamy and Divorces [1742] E-PG Of Parties in General [1741] E-PGB Of the Parties of Great Britain [1741] E-PO Of Passive Obedience [1748] E-PrS Of the Protestant Succession [1752] E-PSc That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science [1741] E-RA Of Refinement of Arts [1752] E-RC Of Some Remarkable Customs [1752] E-SE Of Superstition and Enthusiasm [1741] E-ST Of the Standard of Taste [1757] E-Tax Of Taxes [1752] E-Variants [n.d.] section at end of the volume edited by Miller where the variants between the various editions are cited by page. H History of England (1894), 3 vols. London: George Routledge, cited by volume, page. L The Letters of David Hume (1932). Ed. by J. Greig. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, cited by volume, page. LG A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh (1745). Ed. by E. Mossner and J. Price. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, cited by page. M An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (2000 [1748]). Ed. by T. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, cited by chapter.paragraph. MD A Dialogue, affixed to M, cited by paragraph. N The Natural History of Religion (1963 [1757]). In R. Wollheim (Ed.) Hume on Religion. London: Fontana books. Cited by page. NL New Letters of David Hume (1954). Ed. by R. Klibansky and E. Mossner. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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T A Treatise of Human Nature (2000 [1739–40]). Ed. by D. and M. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, cited by book-part-chapter.paragraph. TA Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entitled a Treatise of Human Nature (1740), included in T, cited by paragraph. U An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1999 [1748]), (ed.) T. Beauchamp, Oxford: Oxford University Press, cited by chapter.paragraph. Hume’s other works A True Account of the Behaviour and Con’uct of Archibald Stewart Esq.; Late Lord Provost of Edinburgh [1747] Petition of the Grave and Venerable Bellmen, Or Sextons of the Church of Scotland to the Honourable House of Commons [1751]

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Index Aberdeen, University of 107, 108 Adams, J. 116 allegiance see obligation Allen, D. 129 America 106, 107, 115–18 Anglo-Saxons 87, 96 animals 39–40, 139 Aristotle 80, 81, 116 artifice see convention atheism 18 Augustine, Saint 103 authority 62, 68, 75, 87, 89, 95, 96, 98, 103, 133, 144, 151 avarice 33, 34, 76, 79, 81 Bacon, F. 13, 30 barons see nobility Beattie, J. 108 Beccaria, C. 124 belief 64, 67, 82, 92, 125 Bentham, J. 110, 135 Berlin, I. 125 Bongie, L. 122 Boswell, J. 21 Bristol 2, 5, 18 Britain 106, 107 Burke, E. 58, 65, 69, 102, 104, 114, 117, 122, 126, 134, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 154 Calvinism 11, 103 Carlyle, A. 12

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causation 13, 24, 26, 27–38, 47, 55, 70, 75, 89 moral and physical 34–8, 52 children see socialization Christianity 14, 50, 92 Church (of Scotland) 10, 11 Cicero 4, 8 civilization 56, 69, 74, 79, 83, 84, 88, 90, 99, 101, 105 climate 34, 55 commerce 14, 16, 24, 31, 36, 37, 43, 51, 56, 74, 78–94, 111, 119 Comte, A. 121 Condorcet, N. 120 consent 42, 60–1, 66 conservatism 23, 24, 30, 45, 58, 65, 66, 69, 70, 74, 103, 104, 105, 114, 117, 127, 128–55 Constant, B. 123 constitution 69, 100 British 96, 98 contract 42 original 58–62, 65, 111, 142, 146 convention 38, 40, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 52, 58, 64, 139, 140 credit 92–4, 116, 120 Cullen, W. 10, 21 custom 19, 23, 24, 30, 35–6, 37–8, 43, 47, 55–70, 74, 76, 87, 88, 95, 99, 105, 112, 133, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144

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debt 92–4 Descartes, R. 5, 107, 134, 138 desires 79–80 determinism 32, 35–6 d’Holbach, Baron 18, 121 Edinburgh 2, 20, 124 University of 3, 4, 7, 9, 11 education see socialization Eliot, T. S. 152 England 20, 83, 143 Enlightenment, the 105, 121, 126, 128 French 18, 19 Scottish 8, 10–13, 19, 111, 132 enthusiasm 70, 73, 112 expectation 30, 32, 43–5, 64, 82, 88, 90–2, 114, 144 experience 27, 28, 31, 51, 64, 67, 71, 95, 125 family 41, 42, 104, 141 Ferguson, A. 148 fidelity see promises Forbes, D. 14 Forbonnais, F. 119–20 France 5, 16, 83, 106, 118 freedom see liberty French Revolution 122, 126, 128, 150, 154 functionalism 141, 144–5, 149 Genovesi, A. 124 Giarrizzo, G. 103, 150 Glasgow, University of 3, 7, 8, 9, 107, 113 gods 50, 70, 102 Godwin, W. 135 Gournay, V. 119 government 24, 36, 37, 45, 55–62, 63, 64, 69, 75, 77, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 104, 117, 141, 143, 146, 154 gradualism 95, 141, 142–3, 149

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habit see custom Hamann, G. 125, 126, 130 Hamilton, A. 116 Hanover, house of 11, 12, 63, 74 happiness 79 Hayek, F. 130–55 passim Hearnshaw, F. 129 Helvetius, C. 18, 135 Herder, J. 126 history 33, 34 Hobbes, T. 53, 80, 103, 134 human nature 5, 24, 26, 38, 42, 43, 56, 64, 84, 85, 103, 126, 150 uniformity and universality of 31, 40, 55, 71–2, 73, 76 humanity 72, 83, 86, 95 Hume, D. education of 3, 4 employments 6, 10, 16, 18, 118 family of 2, 3 writings of Dialogues of Natural Religion 6, 129 Essays 6, 9, 14–15, 16, 18, 56, 78, 87, 93, 96, 100, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126, 139, 143 First Enquiry (Understanding) 6, 9, 31, 73, 76, 115, 125 History of England 13, 16–17, 25, 77, 87, 95, 96, 101, 112, 113, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 127, 144 A Letter from a Gentleman 7 Letters 4, 7, 8, 17, 18 My Own Life 1, 2, 4, 6, 20, 107 Political Discourses 16, 75, 77, 119, 121 Second Enquiry (Morals) 6, 9, 33, 72, 115 Treatise 4, 5, 8, 25, 26, 30, 31, 56, 57, 66, 73, 115, 148 Huntingdon, S. 130 Hutcheson, F. 7, 26, 49, 50, 52, 54

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Index ideas 27, 28, 51, 54 imagination 27, 30 individualism 23, 68 industry 77, 79, 83, 84, 86, 90, 99 Italy 1, 2, 3 Jacobites 11, 16 Jefferson, T. 116, 117, 118 Justice 8, 24, 38–55, 56, 57, 60, 64, 83, 85, 90, 95, 109, 111, 139, 151 Kames, Lord 2, 109 Kant, I. 111, 125 Kirk, R. 129 language 43, 58, 141, 148 law 61, 98, 99 Natural 38–9, 48, 50, 110, 135 rule of 74, 86, 90, 96, 104, 144 LeBlanc, J-B. 119, 121, 123 legislation see law legitimacy 55–62, 67, 68 liberalism 23, 24, 78, 128, 131 libertarianism 23, 96, 98 liberty 23, 36, 62, 64, 65, 73, 74–5, 86–8, 94–106, 113, 144 Livingston, D. 137–8 Locke, J. 27, 28, 41, 48, 59, 60, 61, 107 luxury 16, 75, 76, 77, 78–86, 90, 119, 124 Macaulay, C. 113, 122 MacQueen, D. 112 Madison, J. 116, 117, 118 magistrate see government Maistre, J de. 122–3, 130 Mandeville, B. 26, 53, 78, 86 manners 35, 36, 67, 75, 77, 83, 87, 112 Mannheim, K. 130 military 81–4 Mill, J.S. 110

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175

Millar, J. 113 Mirabeau, H. 122 Mirabeau, V. 119–20 miracles 72, 85, 112, 129 monarchy 87, 96 absolute 90, 93, 97 civilized 88–9 Monboddo, Lord 12 money 43, 58, 91, 141, 148 Montesquieu, C. 35, 115, 121 morality 23, 49, 51, 72, 73, 78, 79, 80 Muller, J. 129 naturalism 41, 45, 73, 105 Newton, I. 12–13, 25, 26, 33 nobility the 75–6, 87 Nozick, R. 48 Oakeshott, M. 130–55 passim obedience 58–9, 64, 65–6, 87, 102, 110, 141 obligation 48, 59, 64, 110 opinion 63–4, 82, 101, 114, 117, 123, 153 order 96, 103, 141, 142–4 O’Sullivan, N. 119, 131, 150 Paley, W. 65, 114 Paris 7, 18 passions 27, 33, 41–2 ,49, 50, 54, 70, 76, 85, 86, 103, 146 perfection 19, 149, 150, 152 Plato 38 politics 23, 24, 31, 37, 79, 147, 151–2 Popper, K. 132 poverty 80, 88, 90, 92 prescription 65–6, 114, 144 progress 19, 95 promises 42, 45, 51, 60–1, 140 property 42, 45–51, 58, 63, 65, 76, 89, 99, 109, 141, 144 public good/interest 43, 45, 57, 81, 84–5 spirit 33, 34

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176

Index

Quinton, A. 129, 150 ranks, middle 75, 87, 88 rationalism see reason Rawls, J. 40, 111 reason 19, 51, 58, 68, 86, 104, 131–5, 141, 147, 148 Reid, T. 107–8, 109, 115 religion 14, 23, 50, 69, 71, 73, 99, 104, 112, 128, 152 republicans 78, 79, 82, 88, 116 republics 89, 90, 96, 97, 118 revolution 74, 75, 77, 116, 143 rights 48, 49, 150 Robertson, W. 11, 12, 18, 126 Rousseau, J-J. 1, 19–20, 64, 115, 124 rules see justice St Clair, J. 6 Sallust 78 savages 57, 70, 71 scarcity 40, 48, 52, 139 science 23, 37, 105 of man 13, 24–7, 30, 31, 33, 41, 49, 50, 52, 71, 73, 74, 80, 105, 137 Scotland 16, 99, 106 Scruton, R. 152 selfishness interest,-love 33, 40, 51–2, 76, 85, 103 Seneca 81 sentiments 51, 54, 66, 67, 69, 72 sex 39, 41 skepticism 7, 107, 112, 115, 136, 137, 147 slavery 73, 88

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Smith, A. 3, 9, 10, 22–3, 57, 109, 111, 112 socialization 37, 42, 55, 59, 68, 142 society 39, 40–1, 49, 50, 53, 59, 68 Sparta 84, 85, 150 Steuart, J. 112, 126 Stewart, J. 23 Stoics 46 superstition 18, 22, 24, 70–4, 103, 112, 137, 146 sympathy 54–5 taxes 84, 98 time 62–6, 67, 69, 77, 134, 142, 144, 147, 149 toleration 46, 99–100 Tories 13–15, 17, 120 tradition see time Turgot, A. 18, 120 Turnbull, G. 25 unintended consequences 19, 58, 94, 148 utilitarianism 109–10 utility 49, 57, 59, 71, 73, 101, 145 Venice 119, 123 Venturi, F. 119 Verri, P. 124 vice 52, 54, 86 virtue 8, 38, 51–4, 64, 80, 82, 83, 85, 88, 109, 110, 116 Voltaire, M. 121–2, 126 war 31, 57, 93, 94, 96 Whelan, F. 128, 136 Whigs 13–15, 17 Wolin, S. 129

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