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

Chapter 1 Coordination and Convention

21 Chapter 1 Coordination and Convention Edgar . . . like a true politician, concurred with the prevailing party. —Hume, History, 1.99 Human beings have certain interests in common (we can for now ignore what they are). But since the social and political institutions that we have an interest in supporting are advantageous not individually but collectively, which institutions deserve our support depends on which institutions all other people believe , or can be brought to believe, deserve their support. Many great problems of high politics can thus be seen as problems of coordination. When the status quo or “social norm” solution is doubtful or contested, they become problems of authority, since only authority can adjudicate the norm. When the convention of authority itself is doubtful or contested, they are problems of coordinating on authority. This chapter outlines briefly the problem of coordination and the solution to it—convention—that is most relevant in the context of large-scale politics and government. The goal is not to add to a huge literature on coordination and convention but to sketch for non-specialists what these concepts mean and why they matter, so as to explain why we should care about Hume’s profound contribution to their study. Here I endorse Russell Hardin’s claim that Hume has been neglected partly because he was so far ahead of his time: the problems he was addressing were not generally recognized as problems until two centuries later.1 For that very reason, theorists schooled in the modern “canon” of great works in political theory but not in recent economics and positive political theory may not be familiar with coordination, or may assume (as indeed formal modelers often encourage us to assume) that coordination need only interest those who think that technical or mathematical models are the best method for treating all political questions. Coordination theory, that is, divides political theorists into those who assume that no intelligent theorist can fail to know the literature on it and those 22 Chapter 1 who are very intelligent but have never seen the point of learning the first thing about it. This chapter will attempt to explain coordination in a way that will be clear and interesting to the second group: those inclined to doubt that mathematics can make sense of politics, or at least wonder whether whatever sense it might make is worth one paragraph of Montesquieu. Conversely, even specialists may benefit from (as well as perhaps disagreeing with) this chapter’s suggestion that a qualitative, narrative account is likely to be more useful than formal models in understanding and explaining the kind of coordination relevant to the fundamentals of political authority. And they may also benefit from considering some unfamiliar political implications of coordination that Hume noted but we often forget. Though coordination problems are often seen as a subset of formal theory, the crucial contribution of Hume’s political theory is to explain, and help solve, coordination problems on scales, and in situations, that the usual tools of formal theory do not address (as well as aspects of those problems, including normative ones, on which formal theory as such is deliberately silent). Though game theorists’ contributions to coordination theory are of course indispensible, the contribution of Hume’s History begins where those of most contemporary formal theory leave off. The Problem of Coordination The modern inventor of coordination theory was Thomas Schelling. I cannot improve on his classic examples. Here is the first one. Two people parachute unexpectedly into the area shown, each with a map and knowing the other has one, but neither knowing where the other has dropped nor able to communicate directly. They must get x y River Road Building Pond Figure 1. Map and following quotation by Thomas Schelling. Redrawn from The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling, Harvard University Press 1960, reprint 1980.pg. 54. Coordination and Convention 23 together quickly to be rescued. Can they study their maps and ‘coordinate ’ their behavior? Does the map suggest some particular meeting place so unambiguously that each will be confident that the other reads the same suggestion with confidence? Among the students to whom Schelling posed the question, almost all chose the bridge. In my own more recent trials, almost all still do. The bridge jumps out for its prominence but even more for its uniqueness. A crossroads might be a natural meeting point, but the map has many of those and...