How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  An exception that Locke makes to the sanctity of private property is in the case of someone who is forced by ‘pressing Wants’, such as hunger, to steal from the excess of others, as a last resort. He derives this right from the claim that ‘God hath not left one Man so to the Mercy of another, that he may starve him if he please’. So, if you must steal a loaf of bread from someone who has more than they can personally consume in order to feed yourself and your family, according to Locke, then you may rightfully do so. Otherwise, theft is wrong, and it is the responsibility of the state to prevent or punish it. This exception has potentially radical implications for the global poor today, since it allows that they have a just claim to the excess of the well off if they face starvation, which millions do every year. It seems to imply the legitimacy of a radical transfer of wealth from the developed to the developing world.

  Locke viewed government as a human creation established by consent and designed to serve our interests, just as Hobbes did, rather than something natural (as Aristotle claimed) or God-given. But he favoured limited, constitutional government rather than the kind of absolutism that Hobbes insisted on. Since life without a state would not be as unbearable as Hobbes feared, Locke saw no reason to surrender ourselves completely to the sovereign, who might tyrannize us even more than we might prey on each other in the state of nature. As a result, he held that the compact establishing the state should be conditional. For Locke, the problem is less extreme than for Hobbes, and therefore so too is the solution. If the sovereign, whose purpose is to protect our life, liberty and property, does not protect these goods, then he has breached the compact that set him up in the first place, in which case we cease to have any obligation to obey him. In other words, subjects retain a right of rebellion against their rulers when they enter political society. This argument proved very attractive to the American Founding Fathers, who declared that King George III had become a tyrant, usurping their traditional rights and thereby breaching the presumed compact of government. They held that it was the king who put himself into a state of war with his American subjects, who were thereby absolved from any further obedience to him.

  Like Hobbes, Locke believed that government acquires its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. This was a radical departure from what came before both of these philosophers. They held that politics is an artificial human creation established by means of a compact between people to improve their condition. However, Locke parted company from his predecessor in favouring the subordination of sovereign power to an elected legislature. For Hobbes, the sovereign alone, in the person of the king, should be the supreme power in the state who can abolish or override the democratic legislature at his discretion. A sovereign who is answerable to another power is not sovereign, by definition, and without a sovereign we are back in the unbearable state of war, according to Hobbes. Also, Locke disagreed with Hobbes that dissolving the government meant dissolving society. For Hobbes, rebelling against the state would necessarily lead to complete social breakdown as well, the worst possible outcome. But for Locke, society does not require a state to keep it together, which makes political rebellion a much less risky proposition than it was for Hobbes.

  The seventeenth century was an age of constant sectarian strife and violence in Europe, as both Hobbes and Locke learned first-hand. Locke’s intellectual contribution to resolving this conflict is his influential Letter Concerning Toleration. In it, he departs from Hobbes, who had predictably argued that the only solution to religious disagreement was for everyone in the state to conform publicly to a single, established church (in England, the Church of England). Locke instead favoured the separation of church and state, opposed as he was to the combination of force and belief. He argued that the state should tolerate religious diversity and not attempt to enforce beliefs. Care of the soul is the responsibility of religions, not of the state. This is a lesson that Locke passed on to the Founding Fathers of the United States, such as Thomas Jefferson, whose Constitution builds a legal wall between church and state. However, what Locke gave with one hand he took away with the other, by arguing that atheists should not be tolerated because promises, covenants and oaths are impossible without a belief in God. His avowed toleration also excluded Roman Catholics, whose loyalty to the state he feared would be fatally divided by their commitment to their church and its leader in Rome. Locke’s was a very limited form of ‘toleration’, although some toleration is better than none.

  Much of the everyday language of our political world today, the vocabulary of rights, property, trade and religious toleration, can be found in the seventeenth-century writings of John Locke. While the scope of legitimate state action has expanded massively since then, the liberal core that he championed remains in the form of human rights, religious freedom and constitutional government. What is missing from Locke is an appreciation of how the absolute right to unfettered accumulation of property might pose a threat to other important rights and liberties. He lived before the rise of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and so was in no position to foresee the distortions and perverse effects that unregulated mass markets can have when they grow almost without limit. Liberalism has gradually adapted to the changing character of capitalism since Locke’s day to include an expanded role for the state as a means of correcting market excesses and providing for the welfare of those who are unable to provide for themselves. But he was looking to limit state power because of the risks that it poses to individuals. Much of the debate in the democratic West today is over where the greater risk lies: the state or the market. The answer was perfectly clear to Locke in the seventeenth century, just as it was to the US Founding Fathers when they drew up a constitution in the eighteenth century to minimize the risks of tyrannical government. But what about the risks of tyrannical markets? We must look elsewhere for answers to that question.

  11

  David Hume: The Sceptic

  David Hume’s Scotland was both one of the most important centres of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and a devoutly religious society with an established Calvinist church. Hume was a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, which championed religious toleration, science and trade, and was at the centre of a circle of influential philosophers and scientists that included his good friend the economist Adam Smith. He was notorious for his sceptical views on philosophy and religion, found himself caught up in the culture wars of eighteenth-century Scotland and paid a price for questioning the existence of God, miracles, the immortality of the soul and original sin. When Hume heard a man was religious, Samuel Johnson’s Scottish biographer James Boswell tells us, ‘he concluded he was a rascal’.

  So it is hardly surprising that when Hume put himself forward as a candidate to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, he was met by determined opposition from Scotland’s clerical establishment, who successfully blocked him. A few years later he tried to become Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow University, a post vacated by Adam Smith. But his scholarly ambitions were again thwarted by his religious enemies, who continued to campaign against ‘the Great Infidel’ (as Boswell had labelled him). This culminated in the established Church of Scotland investigating Hume’s ‘infidel writings’ in an attempt to have him excommunicated and perhaps even prosecuted for atheism, the same fate that nearly cost Hobbes his head. The proposal condemning him accused Hume of subverting religion, and thereby morality, much like the charges brought against Socrates by the Athenians. Hume was not (quite) an atheist, and never claimed to be one. He was a religious sceptic who strongly doubted the existence of God but did not believe that it is rationally possible either to affirm or deny God’s existence with certainty. He was definitely anti-clerical, roundly condemning what he saw as the harmful consequences of organized religions in human history, particularly dogmatic monotheistic faiths, such as Christianity and Islam. Eventually, the proposal against Hume was dropped by the church and he was thereafter left in relative peace, although he prudentl
y withheld publication of his attack on natural religion – the idea that the study of nature tells us something about God. Many philosophers today regard these Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be Hume’s masterpiece. Their subject is still a matter of lively debate among proponents and critics of what is now called ‘intelligent design’.

  The book for which Hume is best known today is A Treatise of Human Nature, which he wrote in his twenties. To his great disappointment it ‘fell dead-born from the Press’, like the vast majority of scholarly books, then and now, when it initially failed to find a significant readership. He complained to a friend that it did not even ‘excite a murmur among the zealots’, whose hostile reaction he had hoped would at least provoke a succès de scandale. In fact, as we have seen, the religious zealots were excited enough by Hume’s work to prevent him twice from pursuing an academic career. So he turned instead to writing a six-volume History of England. This became such a huge best-seller that, by the time he arrived in Paris as the Private Secretary to the British Ambassador to France, Hume, a lifelong Francophile, was a major celebrity and the toast of the salons, where he enjoyed the company of the leading French thinkers and writers of the age. They affectionately called the corpulent Scotsman ‘le bon Hume’ – the good Hume – for his affable nature, virtuous character and tolerant, kindly personality. The philosopher Voltaire praised Hume’s History as ‘perhaps the best ever written in any language’. The British politician Horace Walpole was less impressed and not a little jealous, confiding with annoyance to his Paris journal that ‘it is incredible the homage they pay him’ and adding cattily that Hume’s spoken French ‘is as unintelligible as his English’: he spoke both languages fluently but with a strong Scottish accent that invited mockery from his admirers and detractors alike. Today, Hume’s History of England is little read, unlike his Treatise, which is now regarded as one of the most important and influential works in the history of philosophy, a verdict that he did not share; he preferred to be known as a historian rather than a philosopher and even disowned the Treatise as a flawed work.

  Hume’s Treatise has been enormously influential in challenging the role of reason in all aspects of life and thought, contrary to the tradition of less sceptical philosophers such as Plato. Hume thought that reason remained silent on the significant ends and questions of life, incapable of telling us anything substantive about God, justice, ethics or beauty. He even concluded that ‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’. He is the intellectual hero of the doubters, who have attacked the pretentions of reason and philosophy, rather than the believers, such as Hegel, who have inflated them to grand (some would say grotesque) proportions, as we shall see. The Treatise is the pin that sought to burst the bubble of reason. Hume portrays reason as a weak and passive faculty, the ‘slave of the passions’, without the power to motivate human action or guide our thinking about the ends we ought to pursue. He saw the mind as a blank slate on which sense impressions are imprinted. We have no innate knowledge of ideas, and our reason is limited to comparing our sense impressions and inferring relations between them. Hume did not regard God as a source of moral knowledge either, given the improbability of His existence and the historical unreliability of the Bible. He also denied that it is logically possible to derive moral values from natural facts, unlike Aristotle, who was an ethical naturalist. Hume famously observed in his Treatise how common it is for people suddenly to jump from descriptive statements (for example, ‘she is a woman’) to prescriptive statements (‘therefore she ought not to be allowed to vote’) without any bridging argument explaining how the value actually derives from the fact. Today, this common intellectual leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is sometimes called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ or ‘Hume’s Law’.

  Although Hume doubted the logical validity of deriving values from facts, he offered a naturalistic psychological explanation (rather than a justification) for the existence of moral sentiments, which he claims arise spontaneously from natural human sympathy. Unlike Hobbes, Hume believed that, although we are innately selfish, we also naturally move from an idea of what someone else is feeling (for example, distress) to actually experiencing that feeling ourselves, a process he calls sympathy. Our natural sense of moral goodness and badness springs from this instinctive tendency to respond sympathetically to others (a view shared by his contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who called it ‘pity’). According to Hume, we naturally approve of traits and actions that benefit not just ourselves but others as well, owing to our natural sympathy. So he was unconcerned that neither God nor reason is a source of morality, since sympathetic sentiments are part of our nature and support natural virtues of benevolence such as charity, kindness and humaneness. Natural inclination and habit mean that we unthinkingly rely on our own nature to guide us morally, without the need for God or reason. While this sounds very much like Aristotle’s ethical naturalism, it is purely descriptive, not prescriptive, as Aristotle’s was. Hume was accounting for the existence of apparent moral behaviour in humans, not justifying it. He does not claim that such behaviour is necessarily right, merely that it is natural. If he had concluded that it is right because it is natural, then he would have been guilty of the very fallacy that bears his name.

  For Hume, these natural virtues have been supplemented historically by what he calls artificial virtues, such as justice, which do not arise from any natural motives. Rather, humans institute artificial virtues to solve practical problems that arise from circumstances such as the scarcity of goods and our tendency to care most about those closest to us, which can lead to social conflict. He believed that our natural feeling of benevolence towards others extends only to a limited circle of people with whom we have close relations of kinship and friendship, whereas our natural self-preference is ‘insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society’. Therefore impartial rules of justice such as respecting private property rights and keeping promises have been devised by humans to soften and restrain our partiality. Government, ‘one of the finest and most subtile inventions imaginable’, is a useful corrective of our passions that makes collective life function effectively. Hume also disapproved of both severe ‘monkish’ Christian virtues such as celibacy, fasting and penance and the harsh spartan virtues favoured by classical republicans, such as Machiavelli and Rousseau. He preferred virtues and habits that smooth the jagged edges of our nature, soften rather than harden us and make life easier and more agreeable, an outlook entirely consistent with his own affable temperament.

  Hume’s philosophical radicalism led him to reject political radicalism. His generally sceptical outlook made him deeply suspicious of ambitious political schemes and projects. He had a realistic appreciation of the imperfection of societies and the limitations of human reason, which inclined him towards moderate, pragmatic reforms and gradual piecemeal change over political idealism and violent revolution, both of which he found temperamentally and philosophically uncongenial. As a sceptic, he was wary of political principles that were justified by appeals to reason or faith. He thought that rebellion was justified only in cases of ‘grievous tyranny and oppression’ and should not be entered into lightly. As long as institutions and rulers keep the peace and do not unduly oppress or exploit their subjects, they ought to be obeyed. Anticipating the conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, Hume cautioned any reforming leader to ‘adjust his innovations as much as possible to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution’. Such conservatism led Thomas Jefferson to brand Hume a Tory and ban his History of England from the University of Virginia (which he founded). The Whig Party in Britain thought the same, viewing his History as Tory propaganda. On the opposite side, most Tories also regarded the work as propaganda, but against them, and the Tory Samuel Johnson dismissed Hume as an opportunist who ‘has no principle’. Little wonder, therefore, that Hume complained that he was ‘assa
iled by one cry of reproach, disapprobation and even detestation: English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, united in their rage’ against him for one reason or another. Of his political outlook in general, Hume unhelpfully declared that ‘My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices’.

  Hume was a proponent of the relatively genteel, urban society that flourished in his native Edinburgh during the eighteenth century. He believed that polite company, leisure, learning, trade and commerce all tend to soften and humanize people and inspire modesty and reserve, which make life more pleasant and discourage fanaticism and conflict. Rousseau, as we shall see, thought that they had the opposite effect, which is why he opposed them. Hume was in favour of freedom of the press, religious toleration and private commerce, and advocated an extended franchise (although not democracy per se), a mixed, balanced constitution and decentralized political power.

  David Hume shared many of the humane values of the Enlightenment philosophers he got on with so well in Edinburgh and Paris. But he was also a philosophical radical whose doubts about the power and importance of reason subverted many of the assumptions of the Age of Reason, with which he has been closely associated. Indeed, many of the critics of that age have been inspired by Hume’s deflated account of reason and his emphasis on the passions and sentiments as the ultimate motives of human action and the source of our beliefs about the ends we pursue. Such scepticism made him politically cautious, even conservative, but never reactionary. He joins a long tradition of conservative thought that warns that political theorizing in abstraction from concrete historical conditions is at best futile and at worst dangerous.