Today's lecture is going to be given by Donald Livingston, Professor of Philosophy at Emory
University in Atlanta. Very happy you have him here today. Professor Livingston has written
several books and articles on David Hume and he's going to be speaking to us today about
about David Hume on Colonial Secession.
Professor.
Okay.
This is a paper basically about the secession of the American colonies from the British
state in the late 18th century, but it involves a number of themes.
One is free trade.
Another is the question of what is the proper size of a regime?
Should it be a city-state, larger, an empire, or what?
And then a third is ideology.
How a corrupt kind of theorizing can distort reality and generate mass enthusiasms of the
sort that religious ideology in the 17th century created, but created in this case not by religion,
but by philosophy.
In other words, Hume is one of the first to understand that the philosophical intellect can generate hallucinatory forms of views of reality and corruption that are exactly parallel to what the religious intellect can do when it goes berserk.
And this is a new insight, and I think we've since come to see quite a bit of this because the great struggles in the 20th century and 19th century have not been religious struggles, they've been secular philosophical struggles, liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, socialism, feminism, deconstructionism, fascism, Nazism, isms, all of these are theories.
They constitute a kind of spiritual bestiary, which is parallel to the religious fanaticisms of the Protestants and Catholics and their innumerable sects in the 17th century.
Anyway, those three themes, what I've given you here is an issue of the Caledonian Mercury,
in which you'll see on the right hand side the publication of the Declaration of Independence.
This was published in Edinburgh five days before Hume died. Hume supported complete
and total independence for the colonies as early as 1768. He was opposed to the Stamp
In fact, in 1765, and this position was quite rocked, most of us had not even conceived secession by 1768, and as I'll point out, the Bush did not want to accept secession even right up to the very end.
So the question is, how was Hume thinking? He was the odd man out in Europe, in Britain, on this issue. What were his reasons for advocating secession of the colonies?
The matter is also complicated by the fact that many people see Hume as a Tory, a kind of Tory, conservative, and you would think that a person, whatever that might mean, if a person is a Tory or a conservative, that he would not have supported secession for the colonies, but in fact, Hume did.
This again points up, I think, that you cannot infer a person's moral position from their
theory. But in Hulme's case, I think there is a consistency. But let me just begin by
reading what I have here on these various themes. David Hulme's History of England was
one of the most successful literary productions of the 18th century. It became a classic in
in his lifetime and was published continuously down to 1894 without a break, passing through
at least 167 post-Humus editions.
The young Winston Churchill learned English history from an abridged edition known as
the Students' Hume.
Yet in the early 19th century, Thomas Jefferson made efforts to ban Hume's history from the
University of Virginia and to replace it with John Baxter's explicated version of the work,
What Jefferson called, quote, Hume's history Republicanized, quote, this single book he
told John Adams in 1816 has done more to sap the free principles of the English Constitution
than the largest standing army, end quote.
What Jefferson found intolerable was Hume's subversion of the theory that English liberty
is the preservation of an ancient constitution and his argument that the doctrine of natural
right is a philosophical fiction that distorts and subverts political understanding more
than it illuminates it. What Jefferson did not and could not have known, because he did
not have the letters Hume wrote from 1765 until his death, August 25, 1776, is that
But Hume was an ardent supporter of American independence.
He took this radical position as early as 1768 for the idea of a complete break had occurred
to most Americans, including Jefferson.
And he was able to come to this conclusion without invoking the philosophical superstition
of natural rights or the self-congratulatory, whiggish narrative of ancient constitutionalism.
Hume's radical position on American independence shocked his friends.
The Edinburgh Literati were solidly pro-government. Even the so-called Friends of America, Burke,
Wilkes, Barre, Shelburne, Fox, Dartmouth and Pitt, those sympathetic with American claims
sought to keep the Americans within the British state.
On the issue of American independence, Hume stood quite alone among the major British
thinkers. In agony, Hume had to refuse his old friend, Baron Muir's request, to write
a letter on behalf of the county of Renfrewshire, advising the king to take strong measures
against the Americans. At this time, counties all over Britain were sending letters to the
king asking him to take strong measures. And Hume says this in October of 75.
Besides, quote, I am an American in my principles and wish we would let them alone to govern
or misgovern themselves as they think proper."
What is surprising about Hume's position is that it seems inconsistent with his strong
opposition to the Republican Wilkes and Liberty movement that wracked England off and on from
1763 to 1772.
I'll say a little bit about that, the Wilkes and Liberty movement.
If you believed in liberty, then you were supposed to support the Wilkeson liberty movement in
England during that ten-year period. Hume didn't. John Wilkeson, engaging libertine
and protege of William Pitt, was convicted of seditious libel in 1763 for satirizing
the king's too early conclusion of Pitt's seven years' war with France. He fled the
country and was declared an outlaw. Returning in 1768, he boldly stood for parliament from
of the County of Middlesex in the environs of London and turned himself in.
He won the election in prison, but it was not recognized by Parliament, though in prison
Wilkes was elected three more times and expelled three more times from Parliament.
Wilkes played to the mob and it seemed to Hume and others that the government already
weak was in danger of collapsing.
And the forests of elections, riots and demagoguery were two issues of civil liberty that gave
the cry of Wilkes and liberty some plausibility.
The government's right to issue what were called general warrants, warrants against
unnamed persons, and the rights of electors to send their own representatives to Parliament.
These were issues of English liberties with which the colonists were readily sympathetic.
So the colonists were Wilkes and liberty supporters.
The Sons of Liberty at the Whig Tavern in Boston, which included John Adams, sent gifts
to Wilkes, and one of their members, William Palfrey, wrote in 1769, quote, the fate of
Wilkes and America must stand or fall together, end quote.
Counties and towns in the colonies were immediately named after Wilkes, and if you go up the East
Coast, you'll find the note words of Wilkes County in Georgia, Wilkes County in North
The colony of South Carolina voted 1,200 pounds, a large sum, to help Wilkes' legal expenses.
And I think that John Wilkes Booth was in fact named after Wilkes. People were named
The Apparent Inconsistency in both Supporting American Independence and in Rejecting Wilkes
and Liberty was well put by Hume's biographer, J.Y.T Greig, quote, How could the same man
and at the same time be both Edmund Burke and George III?
How could he defend the colonists in North America for their resistance to the arbitrary
power of king, ministers and venal House of Commons, and yet attack the old Whigs, the
Patriots, the Wilkites, and democratic radicals of every sort for trying to resist the same
agencies at home? So here's the inconsistency. Hume's position, however, was not inconsistent,
that was the result of a coherent philosophical and historical account gained over a lifetime
of studying the emerging ideal of liberty in European civilization and especially in Britain.
Hume wrote a whole history of England just on this question of the rise of liberty really
in Britain. Hume was a lifelong Republican and in the essay Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,
He even sketched out an ideal republic, which had a considerable influence on the federalism
of Madison and Hamilton, but Hume did not think that monarchy was an illegitimate form
of government. The civilizing forces of modernity had improved the character of monarchies and
republics, he thought, so that property and the rule of law were as about as secure in
the so-called absolute monarchy of France as in republics. Whether a modern state should
In the case of Britain, however, he was convinced that constitutional monarchy would for some time be the best arrangement, and it was in part for this reason that he was opposed to the Wilkes movement, containing, as it did, subversive republican themes.
Indeed, the British Constitution already contained a strong republican element and human thought that should monarchy collapse in Britain, the republic that would emerge would resemble more the oppressive republic of Oliver Cromwell than a regime of ordered liberty.
Quote, he wrote to his nephew, such fools are they who perpetually cry out liberty and think to augment it by shaking off the monarchy. End quote.
Now, just what kind of republic Britain might become was intimated in the phenomenon of William Pitt,
who had framed a vision of a great mercantile empire based on an irresistible British naval force.
It was said of Pitt that he was the first to combine war and commerce in a coherent whole in modern times.
I'm not sure that's true, but that's what was said.
Neither the young George III nor the indolent Whig magnates shared this vision, but it had
enormous appeal to the commercial classes centered in London. Pitt, by tying it to eloquent
speeches about British liberty and French slavery, was able to touch nationalistic sentiments
and endow the vision with a certain moral grandeur. The empire began to take shape around
from the Seven Years' War, largely conceived and engineered by Pitt himself.
We may think of this as the First World War, this is how I conceive of it, in so far as
it was a scene of coordinated engagements fought all over the globe.
French sea power received a blow from which it never recovered, and when the smoke cleared
Britain possessed Canada and it increased its empire east and west.
George III ended the war before Pitt's plan was complete.
This threw Pitt into bitter opposition, and he turned to his power base, which was the
commercial interests centered in London.
It was to this popular audience outside of Parliament that all of Pitt's speeches in
Parliament were directed, prompting Samuel Johnson's quip that whereas Walpole was a
John Wilkes was a protégé of Pitt and had joined him in opposition because of the too
early ending of the war.
It was his satirical treatment of the King's pacifist policy towards France and of the
corrupting influence of the young King by the Scottish Lord Bute that drew the charge
of seditious libel.
Wilkes' arrest and conviction led to protests among the London commercial interests who
had supported Pitt's war policies.
It was this audience to which Pitt appealed upon his return as an outlaw, and it was this
audience that four times sent him to Parliament and were outraged when four times he was expelled.
During the nearly decade-long Wilkes and Liberty riots, there was dark talk of overthrowing
the monarchy.
The King and his ministers were openly insulted, not only by the populace but by the mayor
of London and other leading officials. On one occasion 500 constables were needed just
to escort the king to Parliament. London was clearly radical and republican in its sentiments,
and in Hume's view had become a kind of republic within the realm which threatened to topple
the monarchy and dominate the whole. Now Hume's argument against the pit, Wilkes and liberty
Business is the following. First, he argued in his philosophical and historical writings
against governments comprehending a vast territory, or what were called in the 18th century, empires.
An empire is just a large territory, sorry, a government over a vast territory. Quote
from here, extended governments soon become absolute, and a large government is accustomed
by degrees to tyranny." Further, and this is interesting, Hume thought that Republican
empires were more oppressive than monarchical. This is an important point. If you're going
to have an empire, it ought to be a monarchy as opposed to a republic. Republics are better
in their own right, but they should never be empires. Why? The reason is that the king
In a manner, an empire has an interest in treating his subjects as equal.
Republics, however, require homogeneity and majority rule.
The people are sovereign in a republic. When a republic takes on the form of empire over a vast territory,
a distinction must be made between the true people and the provinces.
This distinction will always come up.
And Hume says, quote, such a government will be sure to contrive matters by restrictions on trade and by taxes so as to draw some private as well as public advantage from the provinces.
Hume compared the oppressive treatment of Corsica when it was under the Republic of Genoa with the milder treatment it received after being conquered by the French monarchy.
and also he talked about the Roman Republic and how it was more oppressive than the Roman Empire, bad as both were.
Closer to home is the oppression of Ireland by Britain, he said.
Strictly speaking, Britain is not a republic, but the republican element has so hedged in the monarchy and Britain has to make it virtually one.
The oppression of Ireland, he thinks, is especially remarkable because, quote,
Charles Quote, being in good measure people from England, one would expect it to receive
better treatment than that of a conquered province. He thought the same was true of
the American colonies. They and the Irish were in the same position. A Republican mercantile
empire tends to centralization and consolidation of all independent political life. All powers
Enormous cities are destructive to society, beget vice and disorder of all kinds, starve
the remoter provinces and even starve themselves by the prices to which they raise all provisions.
This natural tendency of mercantile empires is made worse by the late 17th century discovery
of Public Credit, a practice to which Hume was adamantly opposed and about which he wrote
a brilliant public choice type criticism in the essay of public credit. If you haven't
read that, it's a nice little essay. It's beautiful and it's at the very beginning
of public credit. Not the very beginning, but early in the career of public credit and
Hume has a bead on exactly what's going to happen with it. One deleterious effect of
public credit is that it enriches the power and privileges of the city at the expense
for the Provinces, and in the case of republics or limited monarchies, the immense greatness
of cities, quote, under a government which admits non-discretionary power, renders the
people factuous, mutinous, and so on.
This was published, this quote was published, this essay was published in 1752, four years
before the outbreak of Pitt's Seven Years War.
The nation was left with an unprecedented public debt, staggering by the time, and a
vast mercantile empire to protect against a humiliated France, which meant further wars
and more debt. It was to pay for this debt that the parliament turned to the colonies
as a permanent source of revenue. The expanding empire and the cost of financing it had increased
the power and independence of London beyond what Hume could have imagined in 1752, when
He had already judged that, quote, the head is undoubtedly too large for the body, end
quote. Far from being inconsistent then, Hume's support for American independence and his
rejection of Wilkes and liberty are two aspects of the same criticism of the British polity.
Hume defended the integrity of provincial life as the cradle of moral character. Hume
He was a moral sentiment theorist, and morality for him comes from human sentiments, and these require parochial background and training.
He was opposed to the ever-increasing centralization and consolidation demanded by the modern state.
The commercial interests centered in London, which was the base of support for Pitt and Wilkes, was the hub of a vast mercantile empire conducted by war and financed by public credit.
Hume was opposed to big cities. He theorized that no city could really grow beyond 700,000 people without becoming inhumane.
That was his idea of the limit of the city. Of course, Plato had a limit of, what, 10,000 or something.
He was opposed to big cities, big government, empire, mercantile wars and public credit.
His solution was to reduce the size of all of these enormities by dismantling the empire
east and west and by following a policy of free trade.
In July of 1768, when Wilkes and Liberty was in full swing, Hume entertained a fantasy in
one of his letters that ties all of these themes together.
Speaking of these riots in London, he says the following, quote, These are fine doings
in America, oh how I long to see America, and the East Indies revolted totally and finally.
The revenue reduced to half, public credit fully discredited by bankruptcy, the third
of London in ruins and the rascally mob subdued.
Over a year later, the same fantasy appears in a letter to his publisher, William Strong.
Notwithstanding my age, I hope to see a public bankruptcy, the total revolt of America, the
The expulsion of the English from the East Indies, the diminution of London to less than a half, and the restoration of the government to the king, nobility and gentry of this realm.
He did not think that American independence would much affect British manufacturers.
A forced and everyday more precarious monopoly of about six or seven hundred thousand pounds
a year of manufacturers was not worth contending for, he said.
And he thought that Britain could preserve the greater part of this trade even if the
ports of America were open to all nations.
Not only was war unprofitable, Hume did not think by 1775 when it was clear that the colonists
It is worth quoting in full Hume's sketch of the barbarous path that Britain must follow
in order to subdue the colonists, quote,
Arbitrary power can extend its oppressive arm to the antipodes, but limited government
can never be upheld at a distance, even where no disgusts have intervened, much less where
such violent animosities have taken place.
We must therefore annul all the charters of the colonies, abolish every democratic power
in every colony, repeal the habeas corpus act with regard to them, invest every governor
with full discretionary or arbitrary powers, confiscate the estates of all the chief planters
and hang three-fourths of their clergy. To execute such acts of destructive violence,
20,000 men will not be sufficient, nor 30,000 to maintain them, and so widened and disjointed
of the Territory, end quote.
Now, well, we're running out here, but Alan Ramsey, court painter to George III,
we did a famous portrait of Hume and other people as well,
wrote a pamphlet on the war and he advocated a scorched earth policy,
Just this very policy. That a garrison of 10,000 be placed in New York, and that the British Navy go up and down the coast, burning everything, and before the Continental Army could get to the place, it would drop down and do the same thing, until it had leveled the place, and then they could invest it with the proper people.
George III didn't take him up on that. So what Hume describes here wasn't actually war policy.
But what Hume describes has become war policy since. In other words, the idea of total war is quite common now.
And Ramsey gives an interesting argument for this barbarous kind of war. He says somebody's going to object to this as inhumane.
He said, now consider though, we were on the coast of France in the Seven Years' War, and we did not attack the French people. Why not?
His answer was that we were at war with the king of France's army. We were not at war with the French people, but with the king's army.
He says, however, the Americans are Republicans, and the people are sovereign. You always fight the sovereign, right?
Since the people are sovereign, you're at war with every American.
Just as in the French war, you're at war with the sovereign, who's the king.
And therefore, total war is morally justified on those grounds.
This is a kind of interesting twist to the Republican argument, you see.
Now you can talk of war against the Germans. You can fight a war against the Japanese and so on.
That's not human, though.
No, that's Alan Ramsey.
Well, this was the path that a more ruthless Lincoln would follow with better success two
generations later in coercing the southern states whose economies depended on free trade
back into the high tariff protectionist New York-Chicago industrial axis known as the
American system, that is to say, Henry Clay's union of big government with big business.
From an economic point of view, the southern case was stronger than that of the colonies.
The new British taxes were not heavy, and there was widespread support for keeping them reasonable.
Indeed, the famous tea tax was so contrived that even with it the colonists paid less for tea than the English.
The colonists seceded not because of exploitation, but because of the prospect of it.
The South seceded because of both.
Most of American exports, this is a little brief thing about southern secession just to give you a comparison.
Most of American exports came from the South, which exported about three-fourths of what it produced.
According to antebellum Northern economists, the South accounted at times for three-fourths of the Federal revenue,
which contained a surplus, most of which a Northern majority appropriated for improving its industrial infrastructure.
The North could absorb only a small part of what the South produced.
The result was a steady flow of wealth from the south to the north.
Even worse, southern trading partners whose manufactured goods were effectively shut out
were compelled to look for staples elsewhere, thereby depressing southern wages.
A form of consolidated mercantilism more severe than anything generated by the London of Pitt
and Wilkes triumphed when the Army of Northern Virginia was finally brought to bay at Appomattox.
The South was not only pinned to the Union of Bannettes, its social and political order
was totally destroyed in a manner similar to what Hume predicted must happen to the colonies
in any successful attempt by a, quote, free state to coerce its provinces back into the
Union.
In addition to 12 years of military occupation, plundering and ideological reconstruction,
the tariff was kept at around 40 percent every year, but two, until Woodrow Wilson was elected
President. And that was devastating for an area that was agrarian. And southern industrial
development was discouraged by discriminatory commercial regulations such as the pricing
of steel and freight charges that discriminated against southern manufacturers. These were
not abolished until around 1940. The South had a flourishing economy in 1860. The Confederate
states had the third largest economy of any nation on the European or American continent.
It led every nation in the world in per capita railroad mileage except the North.
Under discriminatory trade and taxing policies, the South became a colony of a Northern Industrial
Republican Empire, just as Hume said it, and it's the kind of empire he's talking about,
the worst kinds of the Republican time.
As the North industrialized, the number of farms during the period up to 1930 steadily
decreased in the North.
In the South, the number actually increased, but these were tenant farms, offering little
more than a form of serfdom. In 1860, some 80% of farms in some of the counties that
have been studied in the Deep South were operated by owners. By 1930, only around 37% were owned,
and most of these were heavily mortgaged. Many of the unjust regulations leading to
These were just the sort of discriminations that Hume said a Republican Empire would contrive
by, quote, restrictions on trade and by taxes so as to draw some private as well as public
advantage from their conquests.
Hume's Extended Republic is not inconsistent with what he said against large government
over a vast territory.
of this sort he calls empire, and the extended republic falls considerably short of that.
He limits it to the size of England or France. However, the American Federation of States
in 1787 was an empire in the 18th century term. It was vast, and it was made up of republics
that were the size of Hume's extended republic. Virginia is about the size of England, roughly,
and everything he wrote in politics points to an argument against consolidating a vast
political order of that sort into a single nationalist regime.
Insofar as inferences can be drawn from political principles, it is reasonable to think that
Hume would have supported the Articles of Confederation as a solution to the problems
in terms of macro-political order, and that he would have been an anti-Federalist in 1787.
You can't actually know that, but if we can generate some principles, that's reasonable.
Every worthwhile theory of the ideal state contains a story about how it will collapse.
Plato's Republic has a story about how it will collapse, block, and so on.
Jung fixes on two distempers in modern politics, which if not checked,
will subvert the liberty of modern extended republics.
One is ideological fanaticism, and the other is the tendency of modern states to unite war and commerce into a project of imperial expansion.
To counter this latter tendency, Hume wrote into the Constitution of his extended republic,
quote, a fundamental law against conquests, end quote. That's part of the Constitution. This regime cannot expand.
He warned, quote, that extensive conquests when pursued must be the ruin of every free government and of the more perfect government sooner than the imperfect because of the very advantages which the former possess above the latter.
As the extended republic expands, two contrary tendencies are generated, one towards secession
and the other toward an oppressive consolidation by one section over the others.
By 1850, in less than 50 years, the United States had swollen to some 10 times its original
size.
It was evidently time either to renegotiate the union of so vast a territory with such
different and conflicting interests or for one ambitious and powerful section to conquer
When the Free State of Britain faced this tension between secession and consolidation
in its far-flung territories after 1763, it chose consolidation, and the Americans seceded.
Lincoln, in his refusal to receive Confederate commissioners, and consequently in his refusal
to negotiate a trade treaty and payment for Federal property so that commerce would receive
little disruption, also chose consolidation and coercion, just as the British have done.
Hume, however, favored secession. As he put it to his astonished friend, William Starr,
in October of 1775, he said, quote, Let us therefore lay aside all anger, shake hands,
or if we retain any anger, let it only be against ourselves for our past folly and against
that wicked madman pit who has reduced us to our present condition."
But the greatness of mind discovered in this judgment was beyond the venal House of Commons
in 1775 and the equally venal Northern Industrial Congress in 1860, neither of which could tolerate
and Policy of Free Trade and Self-Government, even though the economic prosperity of neither
would have been seriously affected. But as Hume dryly observed, quote, republics have
ambition as well as individuals, end quote. It is ironic, and this is to conclude, it
It is ironic that Jefferson had a hand in both of the two sources of destruction that
Hume had found to be eminent in the modern extended republic, hubristic expansion and
ideological enthusiasm.
It was Jefferson who first expanded the republic and he did so not by the method of concurrent
majority that had been so successfully used under the Articles of Confederation to solve
conflicts over the Western Territories, where Maryland was able to hold out veto, but by
a simple majority of Congress.
The New England Federalists were right to insist that the Louisiana Purchase Territory
and the admission of Louisiana as a state required at least a constitutional amendment,
and they were right also to consider secession as a remedy.
To Jefferson's credit, it must be said that though he was an expansionist, he was no consolidationist,
and from the first he was willing to consider secession as a remedy to the problem of size.
Concerning the New England secession movements of 1803, 1807, 1809, 1812, 1814, Jefferson wrote,
If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation to a continuance in the Union, I have no hesitation in saying that I separate."
and so on.
The second source of collapse, aside from expansion, in modern republics, extended republics, is
ideology, that Hume fixes on.
This is a peculiar, peculiarly modern distemper.
He thinks that modern secular ideologies are unique in history, in generating mass enthusiasms.
Hume had a rationalistic strain that occasionally corrupted his otherwise sound moral and political
instincts. He was fond of the philosophic superstition that there are natural rights
independent of inherited social conditioning. A doctrine exploded by Hume in an essay of
the original contract. He proudly wrote these into the Declaration of Independence. But rationalist
doctrines such as natural rights are blank checks on which can be written anything that
of Power, Circumstance, Audacity, and Lack of Shame can establish.
Lincoln took Jefferson's doctrine that all men are created equal and incorporated it into
the Constitution as its telos, transubstantiating it by an act of philosophical alchemy from
a fundamental law marking out the division of authority between independent moral and
political communities and the central government created by them for limited purposes into
to a consolidated nationalist regime modeled on the French Revolution.
Henceforth, America would be a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and its resources put forth for that.
In this regime, deracinated individuals, now emancipated from their state and local authorities, could be viewed as a standing reserve of human resources
for the millenarian project of pursuing an ever-elusive, antonomic proposition about equality.
It never occurred to Jefferson that public speech about ahistorical natural rights could
be used to destroy the independent moral and political communities of the states in favor
of a consolidated nationalist imperial.
How to account for this philosophical innocence?
Rationalism is philosophy in its adolescence.
The adolescent seeks two things, self-determination and certainty.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, is a certainty.
But certainty attaches only to abstractions, which are mere aspects of experience and not
the whole of experience.
Nothing intellectually deep is self-evident.
A political philosophy founded on truth self-evident to every adolescent is a politics fit only
for adolescents. Unhappily, post-bellum American political culture is heavily infected with
rationalism in the form of an increasingly left-directed liberalism. This strange form
of self-imposed innocence is difficult for wisdom from the adult philosophical world
to Penetrate, wrapped as it conceives itself to be in the mantle of reason.
Rather than suppress Hume's history of England as an ideological threat to the young confederation
as Jefferson tried to do in Virginia, he would have done well to have studied more carefully
the subtle and profound criticism of rationalism contained therein.
So we begin with Hume's oppression of Hume's history at Virginia and we end with the suggestion
that he should have read it more carefully.
If he was interested in liberty.
Wow, wow, wow.
Very, very interesting.
I'm not sure where to begin on all this.
I never thought of David Hume as an agrarian sort, but the way you described him, a lot
of his positions on issues, everything from government to the size of cities.
Well we have to realize that Bolton and Watts sold their first steam engine in 1775, so we
We can say that the Industrial Revolution begins there. It doesn't really appear as a phenomenon until around the 1820s, 1910 or something.
I think the term comes about around there. I'm not sure. So, Hume is pre-industrial, first of all.
He has to be agrarian because there's nothing else.
I mean, he believes in commerce. He believes in whatever light manufacturing, whatever manufacturing they have,
which is done by human labor mainly, water and air, power, so yeah, I think that he, I think Adam Smith too, I think his economics is pre-industrial.
It's, given his positions, it does seem strange that he wouldn't support the Wilkes and Liberty
movement, is that what you described it?
I mean, it seemed like they were basically arguing for similar points of view.
Well, to support that, to support the Wilkes and Liberty movement, he would have to support
Pitt's mercantile policy. See, Wilkes was a protégé of Pitt, and the forces that were
generating this movement were forces who had an interest in the mercantile empire. So in
criticizing Wilkes and Liberty, he was criticizing the mercantile empire. See, this is a case
These where slogans such as liberty can become ritualistic superstitions.
This is the problem that Hume put his finger on, and we still don't understand this.
They can become ritualistic superstitions.
You have to ask, what does liberty mean?
What is this liberty that the Wilkes and Liberty thing is a part of?
It's a liberty tied to this mercantile empire.
He's interested in free trade. He's opposed to empires of his kind. So that's why he supports the colonies.
Now the colonies are supporting Wilkes. They think their liberty is tied to the Wilkes and Liberty business.
Hume would say that they don't understand their own interests and of course they weren't supporting secession.
He was. Hume was.
The colonists weren't.
They were not supporting secession early. Hume was.
His views, I would say, were more advanced than either the Friends of America and Britain or the Americans.
So the Wilkes and Liberty movement would be more tied to Republicans as in Lincoln and that sort of thing, mercantilists.
Yes, absolutely. Oh, yes, absolutely.
I mean, Pittsburgh, the whole point of that Seven Years of War was to establish a blue water empire of commerce, protected by the Navy, and to pay for it by the public debt.
Human never had a chance to comment on the Declaration as such, but he died. Would he have thought it on net a good thing, as just a piece of writing in political philosophy?
Well, it's hard to say. I mean, he of course supported independence, right? So, this is
quite in keeping with what he advocated. He would have seen it as a secession document.
It's a document in which the bands that connect one people are separated from another people,
right? It's not a doctrine of individual rights so much as it's a doctrine of justifying
The separation of one political society from another, so the entities involved are corporate
bodies from political societies, but I'm not sure if that helps.
Well, but on the equality point and natural rights, I guess I'm trying to understand
Hume's temperament. If he thought that the secession of America was based entirely on
He talks about the poor, infatuated Americans. He talks about the British mauling the poor, infatuated Americans.
They are infatuated in the same way the Wilkes and Liberty people are infatuated.
They're caught up in a philosophic superstition, which is getting out of hand.
and they're unable to see their real interests and the real moral dimensions.
So, Hume thinks that the source of morality is not in pure reflection, it's in sentiment.
And one of the things that can corrupt morality is a false kind of reflection or theorizing
that makes it impossible for you to see or very difficult to see moral reality.
And he's trying to pierce through that.
He's declaring a plague on both the American ideology and the Wilkes and Liberty ideology.
It's all, of course, very complicated. There are nuances and subtleties that we can't go into.
The Declaration says we hold these truths to be self-evident. It doesn't say they are.
And it is a provisional statement. And I don't think that Jefferson can be accused of being simple-minded.
and Jefferson distinguishes himself from Payne and Henry and so on, on those grounds.
Also, Hume operates...
That's a good point.
On so many different fronts, Hume kind of collapses political science with political theory.
He gives analyses that amount to predictions based on certain understandings of human proclivities
and demolishing them. So, it's very difficult to figure out Hume because he just moves on so many different directions, invokes so many different weaponries and controversies.
When you say that human believe in sentimentality versus the rationality, are you talking about prescriptive rights and experience rather than abstract reasoning being the basis?
Well, both of these questions touch on the same issue and, oh goodness, it takes so long to go into these.
I'm trying to finish up a book I call Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium,
in which I hope I will answer your question.
But anyway, the short answer is this.
Let us take something, we all believe in reason, right, and everybody wants to be rational.
And the unexamined life isn't worth living, Socrates said, and we all accept that, he'll accept that. So a reason is something everybody accepts.
But suppose it turns out that there is a corruption in reason itself, just as the body, we all want to be healthy, but the body can generate corruptions.
The immune system can go berserk and make you ill by just doing its thing in an inappropriate way.
The same can happen with reason.
I think Hume was one of the first to appreciate this.
He is not rejecting reason. He does not criticize reason.
But he criticizes a corrupt reason, a corrupt rationality.
You can call it rationalism or whatever you want to call it.
He calls it false philosophy as opposed to true philosophy.
Now, let's suppose there's a true way to criticize and a corrupt way to criticize, and suppose it's very difficult to tell the difference.
Suppose it's very difficult to tell the difference. And it would, of course, be difficult to tell the difference, because both are being done with argument, both are being done from the same source.
How you know the difference is what I'm working on in this book, and this is part of Hume's skepticism, but I won't go into that because the word skepticism will set off lights immediately, but suffice it to say that Hume, the short answer or the long answer to your question, is that he makes this distinction, we can argue about whether he can make it adequately and so on, but he makes the distinction between a true kind of theorizing and a corrupt kind of theorizing.
Now, if you talk about ideals, then if the ideals are generated by this corrupt sort of theorizing, they will be corrupt ideals, they will be seductive, they will be corruptive.
If the ideals are generated by this true kind of critical thinking, they will be benevolent and enhancing.
And his idea of a perfect commonwealth is an ideal of a perfect commonwealth.
and Hume argues that it is the best commonwealth, it is the best form of human political order,
the best, not second best, the best, and he gives an argument. But he, if his thought
is well grounded, this ideal is defensible, this ideal is the result of this true kind
of theorizing as opposed to the corrupt kind.
It's a debate about all philosophers' debate just exactly that way.
I mean, Locke would have probably argued if he had been taken to task by Hume that he tried, you know, the reasonableness of Christianity,
he tried to do the meta-ethical and the meta-political stuff just as much as Hume does.
We all try to second-guess our adversaries and undermine their criticism and move ahead of them and so on.
The Theory of Money and Credit
And that's why I don't trust them as much as I trust some others who seem to just lay
out the arguments and leave the moralizing and the bashing you over the head to later,
unless they're writing a novel, you know, or they're doing a political speech or so.
Well, he did sell 168 printings of his book.
Well, people, I don't know where you're getting this from.
I mean, I look at the original contract and I don't see anybody being bashed over the
head any more than anybody else.
And ultimately, he gives arguments and...
But even the quotes that you read, there's a lot of this, you know, kind of nastiness about...
Oh, he's spirited. He's a spirited man.
Did Jefferson lay out his criticisms in any detail?
Of whom?
Of Hume's books and...
Yeah, he liked the history in the late 50s and 60s. He liked it and recommended it in his letters.
But after the revolution, he began to, I'm not sure why, but he began to think that
Hume's history of the British Constitution was kind of like T-Boys, it's very fetching and everything,
but there's a lot of sleight of hand in it and so on, and that Americans are going to be corrupted by it.
I mean, they're going to not be as attached to the English Puritans, for example, and the English old Whigs and all, and anyone having read Hume's history, it'll subvert their faith in that.
So he wanted to suppress. But there were two reasons. One was, the main reason was that Hume rejected the theory of ancient constitutionalism.
And then the other one was the original contract.
It wasn't because he was favorable to the monarchy.
Well, yes. I mean, Hume does have a, he sheds a generous tear for the fate of Charles I.
He is critical of the Puritans. He recognizes some of the good they achieved, but he thinks they're fanatics.
and Jefferson didn't like that either.
But it didn't bother him, you see, before the revolution.
It only bothered him afterwards.
So he actually, see Baxter's history was,
Hume's history was so popular, Baxter took Hume's history
and he took one of these little yellow plastic markers
and he went through and he marked out all the offending
Passages, when Hume was talking about the Stuart's and Cromwell and Charles I, he marked out all the offending passages and then he went back and rewrote them in the Republican style and then published it.
And that's what Jefferson wanted to use. He wanted to use the censored version of Hume. It's Hume's history, Republicanized, that's what Jefferson called it.
The style is good, Hume's got it all laid out, it's just that his keyboard would find these terrible places.
But I wouldn't censor it.
No, I know you wouldn't. You have too much greatness of mind and magnanimity to do that.
By now, you see, you have to ponder Mr. Jefferson wanting to censor it.
Well, did Hume ever argue against a generalized right to secession?
Argue against it?
Against it, a right.
Well, the way Hume, no, against no, he didn't argue for or against a general right to secession.
I'm not sure I understand what's behind the question.
I was thinking about, he seems to think that secession is a good idea if you're succeeding from a Republican Empire,
but if you're living under a monarchical system that's just and free.
Hume doesn't, you won't find much talk about rights in Hume, right?
I mean, there is talk about rights and privileges and liberties,
He's a moral sentiment theorist, and the base of this theory is virtue.
The grounding of ethics is virtue.
And there are two main virtues, the source of all virtues.
Greatness of mind, which is honor, pride, self-worth, and extensive benevolence.
And then the artificial virtues are tied into that.
But anyway, these are the natural virtues.
And so duty is the primary moral category for human.
The Virtues of Excellence, the Duty of Excellence.
Rights come after that.
Rights are things you're entitled to because you've done your duties or your virtues.
So that's basically how he thinks of rights.
Occasionally there are strong statements.
He believes in property rights.
He believes in rule of law.
These are privileges and ways of life that have come about in Europe.
in Europe. And if you read his History of England, you'll see him giving an account of how these
evolve, how these liberties evolve, right? And the way he thinks about them is that they've grown up,
they've evolved, and we don't know what they mean, right? In other words, we know they're good.
We've lived through them and found them to be good. They've been proved by thoughtful people.
But we don't know the consequences of them, right? So we have to, we have to balance
liberty and duty, constantly, or what he calls liberty and authority.
You have to constantly balance liberty and authority.
And it requires phronesis, it requires Aristotelian good judgment.
So he's not likely to talk, he doesn't talk about any general right
to do this or any general right to do that.
It's more of a prudential thing.
And so what he saw with the Americans was that,
Look, these people have been governing themselves for about a hundred years.
In one of his notes, when he was writing the treatise, when he was in his 20s, late 20s, he penned this note.
The colonies of North America, the charters, the colonies of North America are almost virtually independent.
He said that in his late 20s.
He already knew about the cot charters and all the rest of it.
These people began to assert their independence, right, and their rights.
And Hume just accepted this as a kind of Hayekian spontaneous order that developed, that had to be recognized.
He put it to one of his nobleman friends, who wanted strong measures against the Americans, and I forgot the man's name.
My Lord, your son here is with us, and when he was a boy and did wrong, I'm sure you gave him a whipping, and I'm sure it did him a lot of good, but you wouldn't do it now.
And he said, the colonies are no longer in their known age.
But then he added, but Mr. Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon.
And he was, he thought Franklin tended to get a little thematical sometimes, and you know the thing about the letters that Franklin had apparently slipped to people, anyway that's a long story.
Now he thought they had just grown up and developed, they had the right of self-government, but I guess you could generalize from that that when a people grows up and they have the right of self-government,
When have they grown up? It's hard to say. You make a judgment. People of good character will recognize this. People who have extensive benevolence will recognize it.
I know we're out of time, but what books would you recommend, hopefully written by you, biography of him or analysis of him that brings in the things that you talked about?
Well, the book I wrote, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, talks about some of this, and I've written some essays.
There's nothing much on this question of Hume's attitude toward America.
Sorry? I've written one other essay, published one other essay on this. It's in this new book I'm doing. Well, it's called Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium and it's on the corrupt interlife, the distinction between true and false philosophy.
Sounds like finals time around here.
That's right.
Well, we have to bring today's session to a close.
Thank you very much.