Does David Hume, a classic proponent of classical liberalism, still have something to say to us? Today classical liberalism is (along with its more ideological relative, libertarianism) out of fashion among progressives but also some prominent parts of the Right. On the left, socialism and Black Lives Matter are on the upswing. For some on the right, libertarianism is to blame for hollowing out the working class and privileging an utterly sovereign self, untrammeled by considerations of the common good in sexual or economic matters. Whatever has been said about libertarianism in recent years, however, these criticisms miss the mark with Hume. A quick look at three of his great themes as they relate to political movements today will show why.
First, Hume presents himself above all as a political scientist. Unlike our political science, however, Hume’s is not value-free. Being subject to the arbitrary will of another is an objective evil; and so the definition of a sound political order is individual liberty under the rule of law. For Hume there is a fundamental tension at the heart of political life. Individual liberty is the purpose of society; yet liberty cannot sustain itself outside of political institutions and so of authority. We humans need rules and someone to enforce the rules, but we also want protection from the all-too-frequent abuse of those rules. Hume offers institutional or constitutional design as a means of balancing these competing imperatives. Using insights learned from Machiavelli, Hume aims to design institutions to channel ambition and self-interest in the service of strong but limited government.
We Americans know this part of Hume’s legacy well: When James Madison sat down to write Federalist No. 10, he had a copy of Hume’s Essays at hand. Perhaps surprisingly, this strand of Hume’s thought has something in common with the Black Lives Matter movement. To be sure, Hume would think that “Defund the police” is an unserious policy proposal, and he would be skeptical of far-reaching plans to remake the American economy in the ways some parts of the BLM movement or today’s socialists envision. But protecting individuals, especially those accused of crimes, from the arbitrary power of political authorities? At the very core of Hume’s politics are the institutions and practices that we now associate with civil liberties: the forms of law, the rule of judges, trial by juries, warrants, rules of evidence, and so forth.
Second, along with his friend Adam Smith, Hume was a great defender of commerce, or what we call “capitalism.” Hume famously writes that in commercial society, an “indissoluble chain” links industry, knowledge, and humanity. After the 20th century, it is hard not to see that statement as naïve. The two world wars, for example, showed that commercial, highly developed societies could harbor destructive, profoundly inhumane passions. Industry and knowledge by no means always go together with humanity. Nonetheless, we should not miss the hardheaded point underlying that claim. Hume’s argument for commerce is ultimately not economic but political: Commerce is good because it produces a large middle class, and the middle class is the crucial sociological condition for Parliament and so the rule of law. Only the middle class has the numbers and backbone to reliably stand up to monarchs and aristocrats.
Hume understands the middle class ultimately as having a particular psychic disposition: not dependent on a patron, but also not so rich and powerful as to want to lord it over one’s peers in smug satisfaction. Those in the middle class “covet equal laws,” Hume says. This theme, too, intersects with our concerns today. I am not competent to speak about what has happened to the American middle class in the past several decades. But there is no doubt that Hume would say that a strong middle class is an essential policy goal for a polity like ours — above all because of its consequences for our political culture. From here Hume is within hailing distance of efforts, so far unsuccessful, by thinkers on both left and right to envision a new, multiracial, working- and middle-class political coalition that might strengthen the economic conditions of all Americans.
Finally, there is the question of religion and identity. Today there is widespread dissatisfaction with the utilitarian orientation of our society — commercial society. Socialists and Catholic integralists alike long for a political order with a more demanding commitment to the common good, even though their visions of that common good conflict. Socialists want to use the state in the service of a vision of social justice and greater equality, while the integralists want to use the state in the service of Catholic teaching about the highest good. Hume would not be surprised that our deepest divisions are over competing visions of collective identity, or that those visions end up being expressed in ideological and theological terms.
The massive fact in the background of all Hume’s political writings is the European wars of religion of the two centuries before he wrote. Thinkers such as Hume elaborated and defended commercial society precisely because of the devastation that resulted from those conflicts. Commercial society was supposed to allow persons of quite different fundamental commitments to be useful to each other through trade, without forcing those persons to agree with each other about their deepest beliefs. Religious wars and other conflicts over identity did not, however, disappear with the ostensibly more utilitarian society of the 18th century. Rather, Hume thought, the British parties of his time were becoming ideological parties, factions that used philosophical theories as tools in their struggles for power. Perhaps our own culture war is best understood not as something completely new but as a continuation of identity struggles that reach far back into European history.
From Hume’s writings on religion and identity we may draw two conclusions relevant to today. First, since civil war is a profound evil, there are some differences we may just have to learn to live with, not out of relativism but out of a sense of the limits of politics. Second, it is not enough to decry identity politics or ideology. One must seek to understand such phenomena on their own terms if one hopes to avoid being destroyed by them. Here one may recommend Hume’s writings on the “enthusiastic” (i.e., Protestant) roots of modern individualism, as well as the great work of his maturity, The History of England. There (especially in volume 5, the work’s real center of gravity), one finds Hume’s reflections on religion and politics, divine-right monarchy and radical individualism, and the way in which good causes foolishly pursued have a tendency to destroy themselves.
Hume’s deepest lesson for us has less to do with policy than with politics. No political choice, he remarks, is purely good or purely bad. He recommends to us the ethos and temper of a philosopher, who stands above the parties and puts “all the circumstances in the scale,” assigning “each of them its proper poise and influence.” He calls us to the difficult task of trying to see the world clearly, without being swayed by our own partisan attachments. That lesson is as badly needed today as at any time in the past.
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