The year 1776 is notable for new beginnings. But it also saw the death of one of the greatest philosophers in the Western tradition. David Hume (1711–76) is often described by ideological labels such as liberal or conservative, as well as eighteenth-century party names (Whig and Tory). But these labels obfuscate Hume’s intentions. Neither an ideologue nor a party man, Hume thought about politics primarily as a philosopher searching for true answers. When we approach him first and foremost as a political philosopher, we are in a better position to revive and understand his substantial contributions to political thought.

　　Michael Oakeshottonce identified three levels of political thought, which are fundamentally concerned with different questions.

　　The first level is the kind of political thought that goes on in the middle of political activity, for instance, in relation to the formation of policy.

　　The second level seeks to understand politics in terms of general principles, often by engaging shorthand concepts such as democracy, nationalism, capitalism, fascism, republicanism, or indeed liberalism and conservatism.

　　Finally, there is a third and more unusual level of political thought, one that is concerned neither with policy nor with making sense of political action through general principles, but rather seeks, in Oakeshott’s words, “to consider the place of government and political activity on the map of human activity in general.” This third level of political thought is concerned with questions such as “what are we doing when we are engaged in political activity?” and “what is this activity called governing?” Such enquiries are called political philosophy, and according to Oakeshott, this is what we find in Plato, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hegel, and a few others, but crucially not that many.

　　Hume is most fruitfully read as a political philosopher roughly understood in this Oakeshottian way. One implication of this is that ideological and normative labels such as liberalism and conservatism are often unsuitable to describe his political thought. This is not to say that Hume has not had a constructive influence on both liberal and conservative traditions, which he certainly has. But there might be more to be gained from reading him as the independent “anatomist,” or dissector, of politics that he took himself to be.

　　Justice

　　As a philosopher and the author of his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume is perhaps most famous for his theory of knowledge, but his philosophical project was also concerned with treating human beings as moral beings and members of society. Indeed, he described the Treatise as “an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.” When Hume turned to politics in Book 3 of the Treatise, he did so explicitly as one of the “moral sciences,” as part of his “science of man.”

　　In contrast with the individualism of the natural rights school of Hobbes and Locke, Hume viewed the family as the basic unit of society.

　　Theories for why human beings associate with one another, form societies and states, and follow social norms were indeed central to early-modern philosophy. A pivotal moment was Hobbes’s repudiation of Aristotle’s claim that man was born fit for society, as apolitical or social animal. For Hobbes, it is our quest for power and glory that makes us need our fellow men. Rather than natural, societal ties must be fostered and enforced by the government of an absolutist state, the legitimacy of which is based on an agreement in the shape of a social contract.

　　In Book 3 of the Treatise, Hume entered the early-modern debate about sociability and the origin of government, paving the way for the sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment and the thought of his younger friends, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. He did so as what has become known as a conjectural or natural historian, but what is probably most accurately termed a philosophical historian, meaning someone explaining how institutions must have arisen before written records, based on observable and stable features of human nature.

　　In contrast with the individualism of the natural rights school of Hobbes and Locke, Hume viewed the family as the basic unit of society: “the first and original principle of human society … is no other than that natural appetite between the sexes, which unites them together, and preserves their union, till a new tie takes place in their concern for their common offspring.”

　　However, the natural love of family (and friends) implies and indeed demands a “limited generosity” toward others. Our limited generosity, along with scarcity, means that justice is necessary for several families to unite in a larger society, which in turn is essential for security and prosperity.

　　Though Hume accepted that smaller, uncultivated societies could get by for a while without government, he was clear that no large-scale society would be possible without justice. Against Hobbes, Hume viewed justice as prior to government, which was underpinned by what he called “laws of nature.” Three fundamental “laws of nature” stood out for Hume, all related to property (the prerequisite for peaceful coexistence): the stability of possession, its transfer by consent, and the performance of promises. The total system of human law was an amplification of these fundamental laws of nature.

　　At the same time, Hume notoriously called “justice” an “artificial virtue.” This was controversial because of the Hobbesian, Mandevillian, and neo-Epicurean connotations it evoked. But Hume’s point was certainly not to denigrate justice but simply to call attention to the fact that it is not a natural instinct, but one that we must learn as part of a process of socialization, as we repeatedly observe its utility. Our natural instinct is to be biased toward ourselves, as well as our family and friends. We are thus not naturally impartial, but society requires impartial justice. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) Hume redescribed justice as a “social virtue” (without abandoning the idea that it is artificial).

　　We should note that Hume was a critic of Mandeville’s “selfish” philosophy. For Hume, the “natural virtues” included benevolence, generosity, clemency, and charity—and he criticized moral skeptics, who regard morality as entirely derived from education, or based on self-love. But such natural inclinations also explain why justice is needed, as justice requires detachment and exactitude, as opposed to kindness and generosity.

　　A key difference between natural virtues such as benevolence and the social virtue of justice is that we do not always perceive the benefit of justice in single acts, but rather from the entire scheme. Indeed, individual acts of justice may be detrimental to society. For example, when a fortune is restored to a miser, the public suffers in this particular instance, but it benefits on the whole from strict justice, which needs consistency and clarity. Consequently, laws of property cannot be based on who is best qualified to hold the property at any particular moment; for society to allocate property case-by-case is a recipe for disorder and chaos.

　　As we have seen, Hume calls the basic rules regarding property, while artificial or conventional in a technical sense, laws of nature, meaning that no society at any scale can function without them. In this sense, justice can both be artificial and as “steadfast and immutable … as human nature,” according to Hume. Justice is not a natural virtue like benevolence, but one that develops naturally in social settings. The key issue for him was then to explain how justice had arisen.

　　Hume’s main point was that justice was as little the gift of a specific lawgiver as an instinct. Instead, human beings have had to learn the laws of justice through trial and error, like two people would learn how to row a boat. Systems of law had first arisen, like languages, as a result of conventions established “insensibly and by degrees,” meaning slowly and gradually. More specifically, different families gradually began to realize the utility of respecting each other’s possessions.

　　In this sense, the laws of justice are conventional, but certainly not random. When two people row a boat, it is obvious what will work and not work. The same applies to the basic rules about property. As Hume put it in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:

　　How great soever the variety of municipal laws, it must be confessed, that their chief out-lines pretty regularly concur; because the purposes, to which they tend, are everywhere similar. In like manner, all houses have a roof and walls, windows and chimneys; though diversified in their shape, figure, and materials.

　　The Origin of Government

　　According to Hume, though human beings learn the rules of justice on their own, the institution of government is necessary for its effective administration, which is indeed its primary purpose. In the language of the Treatise, the prominent position of magistrates and rulers gives them a direct interest in the administration of justice. But Hume’s most eloquent description of the origin of government and the basis of allegiance is to be found in his Essays.

　　As Hume writes, though everyone, once the principle has been established, recognizes that justice is essential, the individual “is seduced from his great and important, but distant interest, by the allurement of the present. … This great weakness is incurable in human nature.” This means that obedience to government must be invented as a new duty to support justice, so that “the ties of equity” are corroborated by “those of allegiance.”

　　The invention of government was unintended, and most likely began as an extension of military leadership, which over time had acquired non-martial functions in relation to the administration of justice and the collection of revenue, and eventually became a regular institution in times of peace.

　　Hume disagreed with Locke, who in Hume’s reading based the authority of government on consent. While Hume recognized that the very first government may have originated from consent, most actual governments had in fact originated from conquests and usurpation, and no one ascribed their obligation to the state to a contractual agreement. Instead, the legitimacy of government came to rest on the opinion of mankind, that is to say, the view that certain institutions and individuals have the right to rule, and that the institution of government is beneficial. Allegiance to government was further supported by habit.

　　For Hume, the function of government is to uphold the rule of law.

　　Though Hume was once known as a Tory, more recent scholars have described him as a Whig, partly because he refers to himself as a “skeptical Whig” in one private letter, though it is rarely noted that this only pertained to the conclusion of one specific essay, and there are other letters when he says more explicitly that he was not a Whig. “I have a Reluctance to think of living among the factious Barbarians of London, who will hate me because I am a Scotsman am not a Whig, and despise me because I am a man of Letters,” he wrote to Hugh Blair in 1765. In many of his often-humorous letters, Hume implies that he was neither a Whig nor a Tory: “Some hate me because I am not a Tory, some because I am not a Whig.”

　　In any case, the key part of Hume’s explanatory theory of the origin of government was that it did not rely on the Lockean social contract, which he regarded as historically false and philosophically confused, since people neither know nor think about such a contract. But nor did it depend on any Tory notion of divine right, since any such idea rested on claims about the unknowable.

　　Philosophy Against the Social Contract

　　Political liberalism is often thought to be based on the social contract tradition. Of course, it is true that Locke, Jefferson, Kant, and more recently Rawls deliberately positioned themselves within the social contract tradition, and today we tend to think of them as liberals, and this was of course Rawls’s self-description.

　　Because Rawls has become such a dominant force within Anglo-American liberal academia, we tend to forget that important figures in what is commonly called the liberal tradition such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Acton, and Friedrich von Hayek, were not social contract theorists, and if they had anything to say about the social contract, it was mainly critical. This is a tradition which Jacob T. Levy has called “liberalism against the social contract.”

　　According to Levy, Hume has obvious pride of place in this tradition, but this is a tradition that transcends the liberal-conservative divide. In order to understand why this is a broader philosophical tradition, we need to return to Oakeshott.

　　In his lectures in the history of political thought, Oakeshott identified three broad analogies for thinking about the modern state: 1) the state as a natural association, based on blood and similar to the family; 2) the state as an artificial association created for a specific purpose; 3) the state as a historical association.

　　The most common way of thinking about the state as a natural association in the modern world is the ideology of nationalism, but as Oakeshott recognized, there has probably never been a modern state that has been based on whatever we take the word “nation” to mean, whether we refer to a linguistic community or an ethnicity, or a combination of both.

　　If the state has been created for a specific purpose, before we can understand what the purpose might be, we have to begin by asking the question: who is the artist? The answer from within the social contract tradition is that the members of the state create the state, and they create the state through an agreement with one another, and sometimes with the government, as well.

　　In this view, the state is recognized as a collection of human beings united by agreement or choice in pursuit of a common purpose. We can identify different purposes, from the glorification of God in Calvin’s Geneva, to peace according to Hobbes, the protection of rights and property according to Locke, and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for Jefferson.

　　This contractarian way of looking at the state was rejected by Hume, as we have seen. Instead, we must look to Oakeshott’s notion of the state as neither purely natural nor purely artificial but as a historical association. A historical association is not a natural community, but rather suggests that people have been brought together by contingent events of different kinds, which often have been wars. This was indeed Hume’s explicit view.

　　A historical association is evidently the product of human choices, but human choices made by many generations over very long periods of time, often centuries. Allegiance and solidarity in this context emerge from a continuous and common experience. What unites people on this understanding of the state is less substantial than a natural bond, but it is also less fragile than a common purpose.

　　This way of thinking about the state came to the fore in the Scottish Enlightenment under Hume’s guidance. It is also possible to argue that Edmund Burke belongs to this tradition (Burke is slightly closer to the social contract tradition, because unlike Hume he explicitly says that the state is based on a contract, though he goes on to define it in a way similar to the understanding of the state as a historical association, with an added religious dimension). Other thinkers who have written about the state in this tradition are Vico, Samuel Coleridge, Hegel, and of course Oakeshott.

　　The Activity of Government

　　The different analogies of the state often lead to different views of the appropriate role of government (though this is not a necessary connection). This is an area of politics most associated with ideology and partisanship, but it is not the only way to think about the activity of government.

　　As has already been indicated, the contractarian way of thinking about government almost inevitably leads to the view of government as a purposeful activity—the members of the state enter an agreement for a specific purpose or purposes (for instance, glory, equality, or economic growth). The purpose of the state becomes associated with the “common good.” But the idea of the state as a historical association more naturally leads to the view that the activity of government is to provide the conditions in which people can pursue their own private goals, which need not directly relate to the “common good.”

　　By reading Hume in political or ideological terms, there is a risk that we overlook his most significant contribution to political understanding as a philosopher.

　　In his lectures, Oakeshott distinguished betweenteleocraticgovernment—a government with a telos, or a goal—andnomocraticgovernment, centered on nomoi or laws/rules, which do not themselves impose a purpose on the members of the state. InOn Human Conduct,Oakeshott changed his vocabulary and distinguished between civil associations and enterprise associations, orsocietasanduniversitas,in approximately the same way, but let’s stick tonomocracy and teleocracy (and let’s also bear in mind that they are ideal types used for clarity, rather than meant to directly correspond to actual governments).

　　Hume sought to isolate and discern the activity of government in nomocratic terms; indeed, Oakeshott names him as one of the thinkers who have contributed to the understanding of the state as nomocracy, though he focused more on Smith and Kant in his lectures, and Hegel and others inOn Human Conduct.

　　In teleocratic politics, everything has a purpose, which is particularly evident in state-sponsored education. Even the rule of law, which can be used as an instrument in teleocracy, only has value insofar as it serves the purpose of the state. But for Hume, it is the other way around: the function of government is to uphold the rule of law. As he writes:

　　We are … to look upon all the vast apparatus of our government, as having ultimately no other object or purpose but the distribution of justice, or, in other words, the support of the twelve judges. Kings and parliaments, fleets and armies, officers of the court and revenue, ambassadors, ministers, and privy-counsellors, are all subordinate in their end to this part of administration.

　　This interpretation of the activity of government is built on Hume’s philosophical investigation into the nature of justice, property, and the origin of government. As he writes in theTreatise: “The relation of fitness or suitableness ought never enter into consideration, in distributing the properties of mankind; but we must govern ourselves by rules, which are more general in their application, and more free from doubt and uncertainty.”

　　This is the philosophical context in which we can understand Hume’s interest in constitutional government. In hisHistory of England (6 vols., 1754–61),Hume could be read as celebrating the achievements of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, which led to the dominance of Parliament in British politics. By removing much of the king’s discretionary power, the Glorious Revolution meant that the British, as Hume put it, “enjoyed … the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”

　　But though his rhetoric was different compared with his philosophical works,part of Hume’s intention as a historian remained to describe and analyze, not celebrate or condemn, as a reader of the entire History will recognize. As Hume’s eminent biographer James Harris has pointed out in his Very Short Introduction to Hume, Hume’s technique in the History “alternated the dispassionate observation of the philosopher with the emotional manipulation of the novelist.”

　　Abstracting from the British political experience, Hume defined a free government in hisEssaysas one that “admits of a partition of power among several members whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater, than that of a monarch, but who, in the usual course of administration, must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all members, and to all subjects.” In this sense, he viewed liberty as “the perfection of civil society,” though he highlighted that the survival of freedom relied on the principle of authority.

　　Once again, Hume can fruitfully be read as being involved primarily in an interpretive and analytical enterprise; indeed, as he compared England and France, he was at pains to point out that absolute governments were as natural and legitimate as free governments, and he even suggested that civilized monarchies had made the greatest advances toward becoming governments of laws, not of men (in part, though, because they could learn from republics).

　　This is not to say that he may not have had ancillary political motives, for example, showing that the Tory doctrine of non-resistance could help to preserve the Whiggish Revolution Settlement in eighteenth-century Britain. According to Harris, after the Treatise Hume was no longer exclusively an anatomist of human affairs, but “allowed himself to be read as seeking to have a positive, improving influence on manners and morals.” But this is not to say that the anatomical ambitions disappeared.

　　As a constitutional thinker, Hume became hugely inspirational for the American constitutional revolution, which we celebrate this year along with the anniversary of Hume’s death. AsMark Spencerhas shown, Founding Fathers and authors of The Federalist James Madison and Alexander Hamilton read Hume as a political scientist and historian, who, among other things, identified the importance of federalismin large republican states as the solution to the chief problem of republicanism in the form of factions. The purpose of political science in Hume’s mind was not to cure souls but to show that constitutional design and mechanisms could make it in the interest for even bad people to contribute to the stability of the state.

　　There is certainly a sense in which Hume may be said to have been a proto-liberal in its nineteenth-century meaning as “a name for principles of constitutional liberty and representative government, which have long been the common property of all parties throughout the English-speaking portions of the world,” to borrow the words of Conservative Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) from his introduction to the English translation ofHenrich von Treitschke’sPolitics(1916 [1898]).Hume may also be said to have been a liberal in the early usage of the word by his younger friendAdam Smith, who referred to the policy presumption of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way” as “liberal.” At the same time, Hume’s philosophical case for limited government prompted Oakeshott’s remark in his famous essay “On Being Conservative” that we can learn more about the conservative disposition from Hume than Burke.

　　Nevertheless, by reading Hume in political or ideological terms, there is a risk that we overlook his most significant contribution to political understanding as a philosopher, who sought to investigate the place of government and political activity on the map of human activity.