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43 Chapter 2 Coordinating Interests The Liberalism of Enlargement But government extends farther its beneficial influence; and not contented to protect men in those conventions they make for their mutual interest, it often obliges them to make such conventions, and forces them to seek their own advantage, by a concurrence in some common end or purpose. —Hume, T 3.2.7.8, SBN 538 [W]hen men’s industry encreases, and their views enlarge, it is found, that the most remote parts of the state can assist each other as well as the more contiguous, and that this intercourse of good offices may be carried on to the greatest extent and intricacy. —Hume, E: I, 299–300 My Notion is, that the uncultivated Nations are not only inferior to civiliz’d in Government, civil, military, and ecclesiastical; but also in Morals. —Hume, NL 198 [1773] Before turning to Hume’s theory of how political coordination problems are solved—through conventions of authority—we must turn to his account of how these problems come to be politically relevant and practically soluble in the first place. My claim is that Hume’s history of conventions of authority also contains a prehistory. Before constitutions can get going, actors who at first recognize no common interests with their perceived inferiors, and no reason to abandon local fiefdoms that let them flaunt their power, must be brought to prefer the advantages of peace, prosperity, and an expanded scope for potential projects and achievements to the squalid but independent authority they enjoyed in their castles and cathedrals. Analytically, the matter is simple: the relevant actors must restructure their preferences (one reason why classic game theory, which assumes fixed preferences or at least fixed 44 Chapter 2 preference orderings, is of limited use describing the process). Historically, the process involved great bloodshed, multiple reversals, and lots of politics: a mix of strategy, seduction, rhetoric, and above all a “great mixture of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect government” (H 2.525). In order to cement their nascent authority, clever political actors—above all, monarchs—had to be alert to opportunities for forging common interests among as many other actors as possible (as long as the new alliance might include these political entrepreneurs themselves, which is not always easy to foresee). In order for us to understand this prehistory, we must retrospectively be alert to such opportunities: must understand what it took for authority to be seen as a coordination problem and how amazing that outcome sometimes was. Both standpoints, the prospective one of the agent and the retrospective one of the scholar, require what Hume called an “enlarged” point of view, which we may summarize as one that seeks out potential gains from coordination and ways of solving coordination problems when neither is necessarily obvious. Much of Hume’s political theory addresses the complex, chicken-and-egg quality of this point of view. It thrives in whole societies, among social conditions that make the gains from coordinating with others obvious, but in order to establish such conditions, a few must have enlarged views before others. For salutary schemes of coordination to triumph over a stubborn and excessive attachment to individual or small-group decision making, certain barriers to instrumental reasoning must fall or be overcome. And coordination schemes must be imagined and set up that can accommodate , and when possible further, the greatest possible variety of human purposes , so as to maximize the gains of joint decision and minimize the costs of lost independence. The enlarged projects and conventions that seem to Hume such a mark of modernity are also a mark of a certain kind of liberalism: one that embraces the diversity of human aspirations and seeks ways to promote as many as possible. Preconditions of Coordination: Negative Conventions and Enlarged Responses The previous chapter cited Goodin’s definition of coordination problems as existing “whenever it is rational for all agents involved to prefer joint to independent decision-making.” A political treatment of coordination requires an extra proviso: agents’ interest in joint decision making must not only be rational but effective. If enough politically relevant actors persistently fail to act instrumentally or to recognize their strategic interests, coordination problems will be theoretically or “objectively” present but will lack practical relevance. These conditions are not trivial. They obtain only in certain political conditions and suggest a daunting set of political tasks. The...

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