The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ in the years after he had recovered from his philosophical enthusiasm. He did not forget his philosophical interests, but let them take the more natural shape of a History of Natural Religion, a Dialogue on morals, and the Dialogues on Natural Religion. About politics, he never tried to construct a clearcut theory. There are a few sections on it in the Treatise, but essays and, even more, history were the appropriate vehicles. For Hume’s politics follows no logical scheme and offers no formulas. Although it is consistent in itself and of a piece with the rest of his thought, its pattern lives only in particular judgements. One can discover it in the way one comes to know a man’s character, by seeing him in many different moods and circumstances.

      What is obvious at once is Hume’s refusal to see political disputes as a struggle between good and evil. In the essays, where he commented on current issues, no side is presented as entirely wrong or wicked, and disagreement appears to be not only natural to the human condition, but, when properly conducted, useful. This was far from the prevailing tone in the political debates of his day, which circled around Walpole and Bolingbroke. Walpole, no longer at the height of his power, was being subjected to heated opposition of which Bolingbroke claimed to be the leader. Although both sides were really concerned with the details of party government and the developing cabinet system, each sought profound justification in Locke’s principles.

      The Whigs under Walpole paraded as the party that had defended the British constitution against Stuart usurpations. Charles I, they said, had deliberately violated the original contract between king and people; Charles II and James II had done the same, and attempted besides to impose Catholicism. William of Orange had restored the force of the original contract, and the Whigs were its devoted defenders. Bolingbroke argued that he and the Patriots were defending Old Whiggism against the party who, having overthrown the Stuarts, later deserted their principles. The liberty of the nation, he said, depended on preserving a perfect balance among the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic elements of the constitution. But Walpole’s policies had led the Crown to overwhelm the other parts of the government; its use of corruption had given it control of the standing army, appointments, elections, and administration; it had undermined the power of parliament and weakened the possibility of opposition. The true political division was no longer between Whig and Tory, but between the party of the court, Walpole’s party, and the party of the country, who were protecting the British Constitution against a usurping minister. There was, Bolingbroke argued, room for only one party, of the true patriots, the party of the country. If a corrupt parliament refused to assert itself and demand the rights due to it, the people, led by the Patriots, should have recourse to their natural rights and restore the old constitution, or make a new one.

      Hume refused in the first place to argue in these terms. The Whig doctrine of original contract annoyed him, not because it was used to justify the rebellion, but because it founded the right to rebel on an absurd notion—that government was first produced magically out of chaos by men who were at one moment capable of nothing but war and at another ready to agree on peace. Already in the Treatise, for all his philosophical enthusiasm, Hume had denied that there was any clear-cut origin of government, or any sharp division between a peaceful, social, and a warlike, pre-social state. Government, like all human things, had grown up over many years, somewhat haphazardly, as a consequence of a variety of events and influences. It was unlikely that men had ever lived as isolated individuals; they had always lived in families, and even if families warred with one another, within each there was peace. The association of families under a single government was brought about and has survived through a combination of force, habit, and rational assent. Tracing the origin of government to the consent of the people conflicted with experience which showed that consent counted relatively little in public affairs, especially when conditions were unsettled, as when a new government was being established, during “the fury of revolutions, conquests, and public convulsions.”¹ Thus Hume deliberately blurred the distinction between governments founded by force and governments originating in a contract, a distinction that had become a cliche of political theory: “The common situation of society is a medium amidst all these extremes.”²

      Indeed no argument about government in terms of a right established in the distant past was acceptable. Even disputes about the claims of particular persons or families to the throne seemed utterly unreasonable to Hume. One had only to look into the history of various nations, to study “their revolutions, conquests, increase, and diminution; the manner in which their particular governments are establish’d, and the successive right transmitted from one person to another,” to realize that loyalty to some king or line of kings displayed more “bigotry and superstition” than reason.³ The sort of conservatism that made the past as such a standard was to Hume just a form of revolutionary enthusiasm: “Those who form a pretended respect to antiquity, appeal at every turn to an original plan of the constitution, only cover their turbulent spirit and their private ambition under the appearance of venerable forms.”⁴ It was anyway best not to inquire too meticulously into origins, for “few governments will bear being examin’d so rigorously.”⁵ More than anyone else the English should beware of appealing to the maxims of their ancestors or of remote, uncultivated ages. For the further back one goes, the more barbarous English governments grow: “the only rule of government which is intelligible, or carries any authority with it, is the established practice of the age, and the maxims of administration, which are at that time prevalent and universally assented to.”⁶

      It made no better sense to look for a clear rule by giving precedence either to liberty or to authority. Both inevitably have a part in every government. It is only a question of degree, of the proper proportions between them, and that question has to be answered anew each time it arises. Whatever may be said, the people always retain a right of resistance “since ’tis impossible, even in the most despotic governments, to deprive them of it.” In a mixed government it must be so, since the whole point of a mixed government is to allow the parts of the constitution to resist one another. If the people are supposed to share in the power of the government, they must be able to defend their share: “Those, therefore, who wou’d seem to respect our free government, and yet deny the right of resistance, have renounc’d all pretensions to common sense, and do not merit a serious answer.”¹

      In any case, opposing all attempts to alter a government is simply foolish because human institutions must constantly be mended. New laws must be passed to fit new circumstances; every law innovates somewhat; and it is not always easy to discover how much a law innovates, whether it merely reforms or makes a radical change. Sheer necessity makes it impossible to keep the balance between authority and liberty unchanged. Under every government, there must then be a “perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty” in which neither can absolutely win.²

      No exalted matter of principle is involved in disagreements over the propriety of resisting the established government. Everyone agrees that where obedience brings on public ruin, it is right to oppose the government with force. On the other hand, no one defends the use of violence in any but extreme circumstances. The disagreement then is only “on the degree of necessity which can justify resistance and render it lawful and commendable.”³ And there is no escaping such disagreement because men have different temperaments. Men of “mild tempers, who love peace and order, and detest sedition and civil wars,” are more inclined to favour the established government, while “men of bold and generous spirits, who are passionate lovers of liberty, and think no evil comparable to subjection and slavery, more willingly risk revolutions.”⁴ The only way out is to find the proper medium between extremes, and that is difficult to do because the very words used in the discussion are bound to be ambiguous and confusing, and because good and id “run so gradually into another as even to render our sentiments doubtful and uncertain.”⁵

      Hume refused to argue unequivocally, as Locke had, for a right of resistance. But he also declared Hobbes’s politics “fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness.”⁶ No one but Utopians of the worst sort argued, as he believed Hobbes had, that anything short of absolute government would sentence СКАЧАТЬ