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207 Chapter 7 What Touches All Equality, Parliamentarism, and Contested Authority The last chapter suggested how the separation of monetary from executive power may maximize the compatibility of authority with liberty. Such separation helps correct for the vertical biases built into crude solutions to coordination games. The power that administers government has every reason to grab power (and rents); the power that funds it has every incentive to prevent it from doing so. This chapter addresses the horizontal biases of coordination : the ability of those holding government office to systematically favor some over others in the distribution of public goods or even of legal protection (though unless some protection is offered, subjects or citizens have no relationship to the government deeper than the relationship of kidnapper to captor; they are not party to a convention of authority and allegiance). My thesis is unoriginal, though a bit unpopular among many U.S. political theorists: the main guarantor of equality, in the face of the inequality that governing elites would otherwise prefer, is—and historically was—parliaments: legislative assemblies, grounded on a franchise that became more equal over time. And it continues to be such assemblies, which simultaneously participate in government, assume the legitimacy of governance, and insist on a fair canvassing of claims and opinions as to the justice of government’s operations . Hume, who lived in an unequal society with a restricted franchise and a political class restricted to a small elite, told only the beginning of this story. But his theory, I will argue, contains the resources for explaining its underlying logic and making sense of its future progress. A Humean approach to horizontal bias most productively starts by modernizing the medieval roots of parliamentary theory. Church conciliarists and their public-law disciples developed a theory of parliamentary representation and consent in which the consent of all members of society was required for 208 Chapter 7 the legality of any decision that affected them all. What this theory did not do was question the need for such decisions or assert the option of citizens’ withdrawing consent from government itself. Government was, on this view, a natural part of the human and cosmic order; consent concerned its specific operations, not its existence.1 The Humean redefinition of “laws of nature” as what everywhere and always serves mutual advantage, given observed regularities in human psychology, allows a Humean to keep the structure of parliamentary consent theory while changing its ultimate justification.2 Authority may not be cosmically ordained, but no one who prizes large, diverse, and wealthy societies can consistently oppose it. Legislative assemblies exist to demand that state officials ask the people’s representatives what shall be done before doing it. These assemblies do not, and should not, contest the need for them to do anything at all. All citizens, all the time, benefit from there being an authority. Legislatures exist to discuss not whether the benefits of authority are greater than zero but how they are, and ought to be, distributed. I have argued that government for Hume is not really a “parliamentary” matter. The executive governs; the parliament serves as a corrective to how it governs. Parliament operates more through its economic-political power than through explicit authority, and its role in Hume’s scheme, while crucial, is not fully constitutional. In the two and a half centuries since Hume wrote, however, we can safely say that things have changed—certainly (and not surprisingly ) in England, but generally in legitimate modern governments. Most modern constitutional governments are representative democracies, and none can easily sustain authority without granting a specified and central role to representative and, crucially, plural assemblies where disagreements over the justice of state action can be debated and provisionally resolved.3 As modern societies have developed and their citizens have gained in both wealth and cultural breadth, citizens nowhere are prone to acquiesce to a government that makes decisions without consulting a representative body. Perhaps not just the usefulness of authority conventions but their long-term dependence on discussion by parliamentary assemblies are things we now know, even if Hume did not, to be political laws of nature. It is widely denied that there is much room for equality or social justice in Hume’s scheme. In fact, Hume’s theory of property is often seen as endorsing a very biased game. As many commentators have argued, while Hume may be right that each agent is better off with some rules of property than none, Hume...

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