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

Chapter 3 Convention and Allegiance

90 Chapter 3 Convention and Allegiance There are things which exist and facts which hold only if the relevant individuals believe that they exist or hold and act according to these beliefs. . . . [I]nstitutions and institutional facts fall under this description. —Eerik Lagerspetz (1995: 6, emphasis omitted) You don’t hold elected office in this town. You run it because people think you do. They stop thinking it, you stop running it. —Miller’s Crossing (1990) I am reading Hume’s History as a book about conventions of authority—and the artificial virtue, namely allegiance, that describes adherence to that convention . The History treats authority’s characteristics or qualities, its operation , its preconditions, its effects, and the circumstances responsible for crisis and change in authority and allegiance. There is no logical difference between describing the History this way and describing it the more usual way, as a story of the development of the English constitution.1 But there is a psychological difference: the language of authority and allegiance reminds us that constitutions and institutions are simply other ways of describing conventions that human beings have found to be advantageous. Since all government rests on opinion, the units of political governance have no existence apart from the opinions and habits of those who live under them. Of Hume’s three best-known artificial virtues—fidelity to promises, justice , and allegiance2 —the last has received the least attention. This is true even of those concerned with Hume’s political theory. Many causes contribute to this: the obsession of political theory with questions not of politics but of social policy, so that property comes to seem much more interesting than allegiance; a tendency to take Hume’s political ideas from the Treatise, which contains fourteen mentions of allegiance, rather than the History, which has almost seven times that amount; the fact that those who do study the History tend to be either historians who do not seek general lessons or conservatives who distrust them (or both); and the political context of Anglo-American convention and allegiance 91 thought, in which allegiance to stable constitutional conventions can be taken for granted. Hume’s casual claim that “the principal object of government is to constrain men to observe the laws of nature” (T 3.2.8.5, SBN 543) surely plays some role as well in effacing the importance of allegiance, even though it blatantly contradicts Hume’s own account, a few pages earlier, of how allegiance to government—and only that—not only defines and enforces the rules of property but produces all public goods, from bridges, harbors, and canals to fleets and armies (T 3.2.7.8, SBN 538–9). For whatever reason, the processes by which government, “one of the finest and most subtile inventions imaginable” (ibid.), arises from its component parts, namely partial and short-sighted individual human beings, is often regarded as far less important than the question of what government should do once it gets started. This chapter aims to give allegiance the attention it deserves, with a view to explaining not conceptual or logical issues but the problems of political stability and change. In fact, even the conceptual questions require an account of stability and change. Since the main title to allegiance is “long possession ,” what counts as possession, and what counts as long, bear not just on allegiance’s effects but on its content, its definition. Hume tells us that these questions defy “sound reason and philosophy”: they depend on “general opinion” (or when that is divided, “the swords of the soldiery,” “war and violence” [T 3.2.10.15, SBN 562; E: OC, 483, 486]). Since government is “an invention of men,” and “the origin of most governments is known in history” (T 3.2.8.4, SBN 542), the substantive content and actual development of Humean allegiance are likewise a matter not of logical deduction but of politics and experience. This chapter will proceed in five parts. First, it shall stress the implications of taking seriously the status of allegiance as purely an artificial virtue, and authority as purely a convention. Reifying governmental institutions, as if they had an existence apart from our belief in them, is a tenacious mental habit, but Hume’s treatment reminds us of its incoherence. Seeing government as effectively a mutual aid society has several good effects. It undermines the view that there is something exceptional about magistrates that makes them proof against universal human short-sightedness and partiality...