Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England

Notes

249 Notes Introduction 1. David Hume, The History of England (1983): 4: 354–5 (henceforth H: followed by volume and page number; see references for abbreviations). 2. Ordinal game theory, the kind preferred by Hardin (1999, 2007), posits agents who know how they and others rank the available outcomes but rules out as incoherent the question of how strong those preferences are. That is, it ranks preferences but does not quantify payoffs. Ordinal game theory in one sense captures constitutional politics’ pervasive uncertainty—at the cost of effacing one of politics’ central questions: who stands to gain more than others from any proposed outcome or change in outcomes. I thank Gerry Mackie for discussion on this. 3. Clarendon had been England’s Thucydides: the careful chronicler of a key event (Britain’s civil war) in which he himself had participated. Eighteenth-century Britain took the Tacitus and Thucydides models very seriously: see Hicks (1996). 4. “Most political theorists agree that modern political thought began with Machiavelli and that David Hume was a modern philosopher who made a notable contribution to political theory. Most philosophers do not spend great amounts of time either with Machiavelli or with Hume’s political philosophy, and political theorists (with some Rawlsian exceptions) largely ignore Hume’s ethics, epistemology , or histories”—Hiskes (2005: 181). Honorable recent exceptions include Krause (2008), Frazer (2010), Whelan (2004), and Hanvelt (2012)—and, in philosophy, Baier (2008, 2010). But the first two of these works primarily treat Hume as a moral psychologist who might provide an alternative, non-rationalist foundation for positions normally regarded as resting on neo-Kantian practical reason, and the last three use Hume’s History as occasions for adding nuance to interpretations on Hume based overwhelmingly on the Treatise and Essays. Only Whelan (2004: esp. 127–8) gives a central and independent role both to politics as the central topic of discussion and to the History as the most helpful text for exploring Hume’s contributions to it. As a one-word summary of Hume’s politics, Whelan’s “realist” is certainly far better than “skeptical” or “conservative.” 250 notes to pages 4–5 5. The absence of a political treatise is noted by Stewart (1963: v). Forbes (1975: 84) notes that Hume’s “political philosophy, as we have it in the Treatise and the [second ] Enquiry, is a section of an argument about the nature of moral judgements” and is therefore shorter than a traditional treatise that aims to cover the fundamentals of politics as a whole. 6. Almost all recent Hume scholars believe that he endorsed both skepticism toward rationalist epistemology and a trust in empirical evidence in all practical moral, political, and social contexts. (Ridge [2003] carefully traces prevalent accounts of how this is possible and defends a nuanced position.) No reader of Hume’s History , whose attention to evidence is minute, can doubt this (see, e.g., H 6.295 and H 6.412). For a letter that seals the point, establishing Hume’s acute concern with empirical accuracy, see L 1.354–6. 7. Political theorists seeking quick knowledge of Hume often turn to Wolin (1954). His portrait of Hume as an odd sort of conservative—out of skepticism rather than a belief in religion or tradition—has been hugely influential. It combines all too easily with a belief that Hume was too indolent and complacent to hold any strong beliefs at all. 8. Russell (1945: 673). 9. Hume wrote that the system of human conventions was “advantageous to the public ; tho’ it be not intended for that purpose by the inventors” (T 3.2.6.6, SBN 529). He readily acknowledged, though some readers miss it, that the account in the Treatise telescoped and simplified a historical process in order to highlight a theory of origin: it supposed conventions “to be form’d at once, which in fact arise insensibly and by degrees” (T 3.2.3.3, SBN 503). 10. Haakonssen (1981). Haakonssen (1993: 213), an attempt to treat Hume’s political theory generally, contains a similar emphasis, treating Adam Smith’s jurisprudence as “the sharpest reading Hume’s politics has received” (emphasis added). Christopher Berry, while treating Hume’s thought more fully, like Haakonssen sees reliance on rules as the link between Hume’s epistemology and psychology and his politics: general rules grounded in repeated experience allow for the predictability and reliability needed for economic and social progress, just as they provide the “cement of the universe” in the...