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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2019
Machiavelli's influence on David Hume's political thought is a subject of growing scholarly attention. I analyze Hume's “Of Parties in General” to show that the introduction to this essay is a critical appropriation of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. I argue that Hume's appropriation of Machiavelli provides a meaningful frame to an essay in which Hume will consciously build upon one of Machiavelli's most controversial teachings, that good political founding is hampered by the effects of Christianity on political thinking. My analysis contributes to our understanding of Machiavelli's influence on Hume by showing Machiavelli's imprint much beyond where it is usually the subject of debate, in Hume's political science.
The author would like to thank John Scott, Shalini Satkunanandan, Robert Taylor, and three anonymous referees for their criticism and support. An earlier version of the article was presented at the UC Davis Political Theory Workshop and at the 2016 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
1 The following shorthand will be used for works cited in this article: references to Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (DL) are from Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), using book, chapter, and paragraph number. References to Hume's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (E) are from Hume, David, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985)Google Scholar, using page number; references to the Treatise of Human Nature (THN) are from Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary J. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007)Google Scholar, using book, section, chapter, paragraph number, and page number from the Selby-Bigge and Nidditch edition; references to the Natural History of Religion (NHR) are from Hume, David, A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion, critical ed., ed. Beauchamp, Tom L. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007)Google Scholar, using section and paragraph number; references to the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (EHU) are from Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Beauchamp, Tom L. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000)Google Scholar, using section and paragraph number; and references to the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM) are from Hume, David, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Beauchamp, Tom L., Norton, David Fate, and Stewart, M. A. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998)Google Scholar, using section and paragraph number.
2 Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 180Google Scholar.
3 Pocock, J. G. A., “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in Eighteenth Century,” in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 104–47Google Scholar; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
4 Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. 2, New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Rahe, Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5 Sullivan, Vickie B., Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Rahe, Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy, 91.
7 Forbes, Duncan, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 202Google Scholar; Robbins, Caroline, “‘Discordant Parties’: A Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen,” Political Science Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1958): 528CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sartori, Giovanni, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2005), 7Google Scholar; Whelan, Frederick G., Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought (New York: Lexington Books, 2004), 78–79Google Scholar. Though Hume does not maintain the usual conceptual distinction between party and faction, for the sake of clarity I will. My analysis will focus primarily on two Humean types of division, those based on partial interest and those based on principle, which, following custom, I will call factions and parties, respectively.
8 Gunn, J. A. W., Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Cass, 1972), 258Google Scholar.
9 See, e.g., Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 202–3; Livingston, Donald W., Hume's Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 313Google Scholar; Merrill, Thomas W., Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 140–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stewart, John B., Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 236–38Google Scholar.
10 Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 316; Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 141.
11 “Modern religion” is a term Hume occasionally uses to refer to Christendom and its effects on the judgments of the modern mind. As we will see, I use this term to indicate Hume's thought that Christianity is less a religion than a theistic philosophical system that resulted from the union of theism and false philosophy.
12 Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli, esp. chap. 2.
13 Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 136.
14 Istvan Hont, “Hume's Knaves and the Shadow of Machiavellianism” (conference paper, Brighton, May 28–29, 2010).
15 Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli, 76–84.
16 Danford, John W., “Getting Our Bearings: Machiavelli and Hume,” in Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy, ed. Rahe, Paul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115Google Scholar; Hont “Hume's Knaves”; Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 136; Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli, 40.
17 Danford, “Getting Our Bearings, 115.”
18 The analysis of parties in the history of political thought must especially consider historical and political circumstance: “Understandably, party and opposition came first and political philosophy followed, for unlike some other questions of political thought, those concerned with party necessarily responded only to actual political practice” (Gunn, Factions No More, 3).
19 Goldsmith, M. M., “Faction Detected: Ideological Consequences of Robert Walpole's Decline and Fall,” History 64, no. 210 (1979): 14, 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, James A., Hume: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mossner, Ernest Campbell, The Life of David Hume (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 140–41Google Scholar.
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21 “Tros rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo” (Aeneid 10.108). See Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, 154–66, and Phillipson, Nicholas, Hume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989)Google Scholar, chap. 2, concerning the extent to which Hume saw his Essays as an Addisonian project. Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 16, also shows that Hume follows Addison by casting his project in the Socratic terms voiced by Cicero, “bringing philosophy down from the heavens.”
22 Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 219; Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, 169.
23 Trenchard, John and Gordon, Thomas, Cato's Letters, or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Hamowy, Ronald (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1995), 1:120Google Scholar (letter no. 16).
24 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 483–84.
25 The Craftsman, no. 674 (June 9, 1739), in Gunn, Factions No More, 104, emphasis in original.
26 Goldsmith, “Faction Detected,” 9. Hume probably read this work at some point, as he asks for the book in a letter (The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig [Oxford: Clarendon, 1932], 1:55). Exactly when this reading might have occurred is uncertain, as the estimated dating of the letter relies on this request.
27 Gunn, Factions No More, 146, emphasis in original.
28 On the significance of Bolingbroke to Hume's party essays, see Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, esp. chap. 6, though cf. Goldsmith, “Faction Detected,” 17.
29 For a more extended treatment of Bolingbroke's political thought, see Mansfield, Harvey C., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.
30 Dissertation upon Parties, Letter IX, Craftsman, no. 394 (January 19, 1734), in Bolingbroke: Political Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 85–86.
31 Dissertation upon Parties, Letter IV, Craftsman, no. 284 (November 17, 1733), in Political Writings, 37.
32 Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies”; Raab, Felix, The English Face of Machiavelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Rahe, Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy; Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism.
33 Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters, 1:121 (letter no. 16).
34 Dissertation upon Parties, Letter XII, Craftsman, no. 436 (November 9, 1734), in Political Writings, 118.
35 London Journal, no. 552 (February 28, 1730), in Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 164.
36 Polybius describes a natural cycle of six regimes, alternating between the good and the bad, which both Sparta and Rome counteracted by mixing elements of the three good (see Histories 6.3–10). As is his wont, Machiavelli never cites Polybius, but adheres so closely to the Polybian story that his innovations are made clear (see Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 32–41Google Scholar). One notable innovation is the addition of the problem of foreign adversaries, which would prevent any republic from completing the cycle, thus leading to the conclusion that the “better ordered republic is simply the one that conquers its neighbor revolving in the cycle” (Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders, 38). Though the need to become an acquisitive republic is at the core of Machiavelli's advice to involve the people in public things, this martial purpose is underemphasized in the republican face of Machiavelli (see Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism, 38–43).
37 Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies”; Raab, English Face of Machiavelli, 190–95; Wootton, David, “The Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, ed. Wootton, David (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 14Google Scholar.
38 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 147; Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies,” 132.
39 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 78–79.
40 Burtt, Shelley, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Ibid., 93.
42 Ibid., 99–100.
43 Dissertation upon Parties, Letter XII, Craftsman, no. 436 (November 9, 1734), in Political Writings, 111.
44 Hume denounces Bolingbroke's “Machiavellian moralists” and talk of corruption (Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 225), and provides “an elaborate response to the political science of the classical republicans” (Moore, James, “Hume's Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 10, no. 4 [1977]: 810CrossRefGoogle Scholar). He rejects the Harringtonian singular focus on property (E 47–48, 515), and though he adopts the oft-cited Machiavellian dictum to return to first principles (E 516), he is cautious about its application to England, since he thought the constitution was neither “matchless” (E 30) nor ancient (as was shown throughout the History of England).
45 The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1860), 3:301
46 Hume, David, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:130Google Scholar.
47 Paterson, Timothy H., “On the Role of Christianity in the Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon,” Polity 19, no. 3 (1987): 439–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 2:113; White, Howard B., Peace among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 45–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Bacon's admiration of Machiavelli, see Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 2:31–37, and Raab, English Face of Machiavelli, 74.
48 Works of Francis Bacon, 3:430, 4:450.
49 For a third Baconian ranking, and one which reflects the judgments found in the Advancement of Learning, see Novum Organum 1.129 (Works, 4:113–15).
50 Why Hume decides to veil his engagement with the Discourses (which he considered a work of “great judgment and genius” [E 634]) in this instance while explicitly engaging with Machiavelli elsewhere is a perplexing question I do not intend to answer conclusively. As will become clear, my interpretation offers the suggestion that Hume may be wary given his task of displacing one popular Machiavellian teaching with a revised version of one of Machiavelli's most controversial opinions regarding Christianity.
51 Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Machiavelli's other examples of religion show its limitations; the example of Scipio forcing the people to swear an oath “with naked steel in hand” suggests that religion may have to be armed to be useful (DL 1.11.1).
53 Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli's God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), xiGoogle Scholar.
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55 Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders, 57. Mansfield interprets the Florentine Histories in a similar way (Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli's Virtue [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 137–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar), claiming that Machiavelli's condemnation of Florentine factions involving “sects” is a reference to the influence of Christianity (cf. Lucchese, Filippo Del, “Crisis and Power: Economics, Politics and Conflict in Machiavelli's Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 30, no. 1 [2009]: 75–96Google Scholar).
56 See, for example, Lefort, Claude, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Smith, Michael B. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 234–49Google Scholar; McCormick, John P., “Subdue the Senate: Machiavelli's ‘Way of Freedom’ or Path to Tyranny?,” Political Theory 40, no. 6 (2012): 714–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 The British reader at the time would have recalled, as readily as Machiavelli, the call to realism in the introduction to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees: “One of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are” (Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998], 1:39Google Scholar).
58 See Danford, “Getting Our Bearings,” on the different grounds of Humean and Machiavellian empiricism.
59 Hume's refutation of Bolingbroke's constitutional analysis is a prime example of Hume's science of politics as found in the Essays. This science is predicated on the notion that experience and observation would reveal that laws have consequences “almost as general and certain” as the natural sciences (E 16), and would thus be a science primarily of use to the designer of political institutions (Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 135), displacing the well-established advice of the classical republican tradition (Moore, “Hume's Political Science”).
60 Though less founded on a science of politics, Walpole's rationalizers offered similar-sounding arguments in the London Journal. See Gunn, Factions No More, 113–18.
61 Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, 169–70.
62 Haakonssen, Knud, “The Structure of Hume's Political Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. Norton, David Fate and Taylor, Jacqueline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 369Google Scholar.
63 An extensive and valuable account of Christianity as a union between theism and philosophy is provided by Livingston, Donald W., Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 5.
64 Ibid., 111.
65 Ibid., 117.
66 Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, 313.
67 Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 146.
68 Ibid. Hume's lifelong defense of having a state church should thus be understood as an attempt to deal with the specific problem of priestly ambition, only one of the many problems resulting from modern religion. On church establishment in Hume's thought, see Whelan, Frederick G., “Church Establishments, Liberty and Competition in Religion,” Polity 23, no. 2 (1990): 155–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordan, Will R., “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration of David Hume and Religious Establishment,” Review of Politics 64, no. 4 (2002): 687–713CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Susato, Ryu, “Taming ‘the Tyranny of Priests’: Hume's Advocacy of Religious Establishments,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 2 (2012): 273–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 Merrill, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, 140.
70 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 165.
71 Raab, English Face of Machiavelli, 190.
72 Moore, “Hume's Political Science,” 825; Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 229.