DAVID HUME 1711-1776
Scotsman, born and died in Edinburgh, family from Ninewells in Berwickshire (= the
countryside also of John Duns Scotus) in the border
country, empiricist and sceptic in philosophy, also
into what we nowadays call the social sciences and wrote a history of England
from Julius Caesar until 1688. For a
short time, charge d'affairs at the English Embassy
in
Works:
1739-40: A Treatise of Human Nature
1741-2: Essays
Moral and Political (later editions: Essays
Moral,
Political and Literary.)
1748 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
1752 Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
Political Discourses (= in fact what we
call economics, topics include commerce, money, interest, balance of trade,
taxes, public credit.)
1752-1763: A History of
1779 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
(published posthumously by his nephew, also David)
Bibliography:
Duncan Forbes, Hume's
Philosophical Politics.
F. A. Hayek, "The Legal
and Political Philosophy of David Hume", in Hume, edited V.C. Chappell (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp.
335-360.
Hume's
Political Theory:
Hume's ideas in political theory are spread over a number of works: Treatise, Essays, Political Discourses and also A History of England. What follows are just a few notes, gleaned from various places.
1) People
are not basically egoistic or even individualistic:
·
People say: we do everything
for pleasure. But this is to put the
cart before the horse and also involves a failure in conceptual analysis. I get pleasure out of doing good things for
my friends because I love them, not the other way around: I don't get the same pleasure out of doing the
same thing for my enemy. It is the love
which determines the pleasure, not the pleasure the love. I get pleasure out of doing things for which
I have a passion or predeliction: it is the passion
which determines the pleasure, and it so happens that some of our passions are other directed. Whether we are selfish or not is determined
by what we get pleasure from, not whether or not we get pleasure in our
actions.
·
Sympathy or humanity is quite
as powerful a force in human nature as self-interest, and is at the source of
our approval for most of the virtues.
·
People get into society as
much out of sympathy or humanity or spontaneous fellow feeling or benevolence,
albeit somewhat confined, as out of self-interest or interest in the
preservation of their own lives and liberties and properties.
2)Despite this, Hume's doctrine of the function of government is not all that
different to Locke.
·
Society and the virtue of
justice go together, justice having to do mostly with property
rights: where there is no property, there is no justice.
·
We all have a long term
interest in the maintenance of justice and in the approval which the humanity
of others will give to us should we do so; the trouble is, we also have an
inveterate preference for immediate over remote. It is the inveterate preference for immediate
over remote which makes over a period of time for the origin of government, for
the sake of the maintenance of justice necessary for the existence of society. Our long term interest engineers things so
that our inveterate preference gets negated.
This is a slow process, and more analogous to two people in a boat
getting into step than two people sitting down and making a contract.
3) On the foundation of authority in the consent
of the governed, Hume has two opinions:
(a)In the Treatise:
there is no government without the consent of the governed. Brute force is a very inferior form of
power. All people are sensible, that
they owe obedience to government merely on account of the public interest.
However, Hume distinguishes between the right to
power of government and the criteria for the placement of power: there may be
no government without consent, but that doesn't mean we only consent to people
whom we have elected. [This is not so
different to Locke.]
(b)In the Essays:
the criteria for placement of power, like election and present possession and
property, determine both the authority of government and to whom authority is
due. Like Locke, Hume still allows for
the possibility of resistence: passive obedience is
by no means required. He is even
prepared to allow that government in its earliest infancy arose from something
like a contract. But he strongly denies
that government at present rests on no other foundation than that of a
conditional promise. This probably
connects up with Hume's greater awareness of the social nature of human beings.
4) In his practical politics, practical
application of the theory, Hume is concerned always with walking a middle,
moderate line between the value of liberty and the requirement of authority,
Parliament and Monarchy, Whig and Tory (Liberal and Conservative): a middle, moderate line with retains authority
in government as necessary to the existence of civil society and liberty as
essential to its perfection.
Hume also has a fascination for the historical
preconditions for the progress of the arts and sciences: while arts, science and philosophy generally
have their origin in freer governments, e.g.
Also in Hume: democracies are better than
monarchies for their own people, commonly worse for their provinces.
5) Some of Hume's ideas in economics are taken up
again by his friend Adam Smith. For
example, the idea of free trade: there is no need to fear that trade will get
out of balance or that money should abandon a kingdom where there are people
and industry. Less money means a
lowering of price which increases export competitiveness which brings money
back in. The increase of riches and
commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches
and commerce of all its neighbours.
Hume however does not try to put his ideas into a
system.
6) Perhaps the most important thing to take away
from Hume in respect of political philosophy is the healthy skepticism which he
has in respect of the applicability of system and theories worked out in the
philosophical closet to the real world.
Both the style and content of his political essays and also his history
writing are calculated to combat Party Rage, to remove people from their party
dogmatisms of one kind or another. We
cannot be confident even of the best founded political principles.
There are plenty of contemporary applications for
this last lesson: dogmatic marxism,
reaganomics, Thatcherism, economic
rationalism/fundamentalism generally etc.
Any political or economic theorist, when s/he comes to apply the nice
theory to the real world, has to cope with the concrete nature of people in
society and the almost infinite complexity of the circumstances which determine
in practice what people will do.
Influence: Because of his History and some of the things he says in his essays, he
was regarded as a Tory. But it is more a
matter of his not being a partison Whig, not being
'politically correct' in terms of the other side. He tries to tell the story as he thinks it to
have actually been, rather than by way of a Whig reconstruction. On the other hand, his essay "Idea of a