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

Preface

ix Preface In his own time, Hume’s religious opinions and his largely naturalistic treatment of morality made him a controversial figure. My own encounter with Hume has, perhaps surprisingly, retained a hint of forbidden knowledge. My only formal education in Hume (two sessions in an undergraduate survey course) in effect assured me that Hume, as a quasi-relativist whose moral theory appealed to sentiment, could safely be ignored as irrelevant to political theory’s real task: seeking rational standards for evaluating political and moral obligations. That portrayal, though extreme, only radicalized what, I later learned, many philosophy departments still teach: Hume’s theory, however intelligent and original, fails to give proper accounts of normativity, practical reason, or the authority of moral requirements—fails, in short, to be Kant’s. Harvard’s Government department, where I earned my undergraduate and graduate degrees, lacked this neo-Kantian dogmatism. But it had a canon of its own that also left little space for Hume, or Hume’s questions, among its roster of ancients who sought the Good Life (or, depending on whom one consulted, apprehended natural Right) and moderns concerned with the origins and limits of political obligation in the face of natural liberty and equality. When, after my graduate training, I began to read Hume seriously , he seemed to me much as he must have seemed to his contemporaries, though for different reasons. What made his work bracing, both shocking and liberating, was not just what he said but what he claimed a license to ignore . Hume showed me—and can still show others who encounter him in his native, wild habitat—how many icons can be shattered if one merely presses good sense and observation where they lead, with a constant sense of sanity and humanity but without regard to reigning myths. x Preface Approaching Hume as a special-purpose autodidact has had costs, but also advantages. Not knowing at first that Hume scholars were supposed to read only the “philosophical” works and ignore the History of England, I encountered that book as a revelation, as the unparalleled synthesis of statecraft , scholarship, human science, rhetoric, and philosophy that it seemed to Hume’s contemporaries and to generations of later admirers. Never before and never since has the best philosopher of an era written a book about the varieties of political choice and about the institutions that arise from the stealthy aggregation of political choices. The result remains an inexhaustible source of both joy and instruction. Not knowing that even eccentrics who read the History were supposed to take only the Stuart volumes seriously, I took up the whole and found that some of Hume’s best political theory, and best writing, occurs in the last volumes he wrote: the ancient and medieval ones. Finally, while the secondary literature on Hume has been of enormous help to me, and I hope I have given it proper credit, I have been free—too free, some will think—to take my own approach to Hume’s fiercely independent thought via a set of questions suggested by politics, not by the literature. Those who have read my first book, Ruling Passions, may wonder how the two relate. The books are very different in style, subject matter, and approach. And on an obvious level, while my first book admittedly displays the child-ofimmigrant ’s determination to understand my own country, this book tries to understand politics through the greater distance allowed by an encounter with another. (Here I feebly imitate Hume himself, who wrote about England as a Scot.) But there are also continuities. Both books aim at a political theory that treats not ideal institutions but real politics, seen as a realm of action and strategy . Both show some sympathy toward rational choice theory (greater now), though in a non-sectarian and non-exclusivist form. Both aim to vindicate a kind of liberal and democratic theory that is grounded in politics rather than starting from legal or philosophical alternatives to politics. Both are concerned with the interplay between political reform and constitutional conservation. One way to understand the connection between that book and this is through this last theme. In my first book I largely took constitutional forms of politics for granted, as being both durable and desirable. In this one I seek more fundamental explanations of where they come from and what they accomplish. This work has profited from what Hume called (in a different context) “the force of many sympathies.” Among countless...