Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T09:46:54.610Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Rhetoric of Rebellion in Hume's Constitutional Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Thomas W. Merrill
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his History of England, David Hume suggests that the doctrine of resistance should be concealed from the populace. But this suggestion in the very public location of the History has the effect of revealing this doctrine as much as concealing it. How should we understand this perplexing rhetorical strategy? Hume's paradoxical rhetoric is a symptom of the problem that the right of rebellion poses for every political society. On the one hand, the right of rebellion undeniably exists; on the other, no regime can recognize that right fully. The problem of rebellion thus reveals the simultaneous necessity and limitations of law. Hume's playful, transparent rhetoric is intended to compel us to reflect upon the deeper tension between liberty and authority in every political society and to furnish us with an example of how that tension might be prudently and honestly handled.

At a pivotal moment in the History of England, Hume writes: “If ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to hide truth from the populace, it must be confessed, that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all speculative reasoners ought to observe, with regard to this principle, the same cautious silence which the laws, in every species of government, have ever prescribed to themselves.” On its face, this is a recommendation that the “doctrine of resistance,” perhaps the most important principle of modern liberalism, be kept a secret, hidden away from the people at large.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Spring 2005 , pp. 257 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Hume, David, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, vol. 5 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), p. 544.Google Scholar References in the text marked H include volume number in roman numerals followed by page numbers. Hume's, other works will be referred to as follows: T refers to A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed.Selby-Bigge, L. A. and Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978);Google ScholarEssays to Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985);Google ScholarEnquiries to Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975);Google Scholar NHR to Natural History of Religion, ed. Root, H. E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956).Google Scholar

2. For example, John Danford's helpful discussion of the History focuses on progress and political economy and does not mention, so far as I can see, the right of resistance. See David Hume and the Problem of Reason (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar Commentators who do notice that right, albeit briefly, include Stewart, John B., Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). pp. 183–84;Google ScholarWootton, David, “Hume, ‘the historian’,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hume, ed. by Norton, David Fate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 281–312;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Whelan, Frederick, “Hume and Contractarianism,” Polity 27, no. 2 (1994): 201–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSabl's, Andrew “When Bad Things Happen From Good People (and Vice-Versa): Hume's Political Ethics of Revolution,” Polity 35, no. 1 (2002): 73–92,CrossRefGoogle Scholar approaches some of these issues in a different light.

3. See notes 10 and 23 below.

4. See Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. with an introduction and notes by Pocock, J. G. A. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar Of course, Burke's suggestion is ambiguous in the same way Hume's is. Consider Lerner's, Ralph comment on this passage: “It is no less curious to observe how, in discussions of extreme situations, Burke lifts with one hand the veil his other hand is lowering. In this respect most especially he sets himself apart from those modern adherents of conservatism who claim him as their spiritual forefather.” Revolutions Revisited (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 81.Google Scholar

5. Helpful treatments of the History as a whole include Pocock's, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);Google Scholar and Miller, Eugene F., “Hume on Liberty in the Successive English Constitutions,” in Liberty in Hume's History of England, ed. by Capaldi, Nicholas and Livingston, Donald W. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 53–103.Google Scholar

6. David Wootton observes that the key to understanding Hume's politics in the History is seeing when and why his sympathies change sides, and gives a helpful summary of those changes in “Hume, ‘the historian’.”

7. Bongie, Laurence L., David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), pp. 141–48.Google Scholar

8. All later references to the History in this section come from this passage, on pages 544–46 of volume 5 of the Liberty Fund edition.Google Scholar

9. For example, Knud Haakonssen writes that Hume “could not use the concept of rights to formulate his argument. When he does talk of rights, it is casually and in connection with property and contract, or it is in the context of authority—the right to govern.” See “The Structure of Hume's Political Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hume, pp. 199–200.Google Scholar For a similar statement, see Whelan, Frederick, “Hume and Contractarianism,” 220.Google Scholar Even though he discusses Hume's views on the legitimacy of rebellion, Whelan does not connect it with the question of rights, or mention Hume's own formulation of resistance as a right.

10. I cannot concur with Donald Livingston's claim that Hume's right of resistance applies only or even primarily to communities or social orders rather than to individuals. See Philosophical Melancholy and Delirirum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 349, 366.Google Scholar I see much more of a Lockean core, albeit obscured, to Hume's politics than does Livingston.

11. Postema, Gerald, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 84.Google Scholar

12. I am thus in agreement with scholars such as David Gauthier that Hume is, in important respects, a contractarian. See Gauthier, , “David Hume, Contractarian,” Philosophical Review 88, no. 1 (1979): 3–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Whelan also connects legitimate resistance with Hume's version of contractarianism. See “Hume and Contractarianism,” p. 202.Google Scholar My interpretation of Hume's right of rebellion is in accord with Gauthier's argument that Hume's utility is not Bentham's total maximized utility, but a mutual expected utility, i.e. one that respects the separateness of persons. On this point Hume is closer to Locke than to Bentham.

13. According to book 2 of the Treatise of Human Nature, the self is constituted by the passion of pride, which makes claims of property on the world; because Hume thinks that pride is reflexive, the primary claim of ownership the self makes is to itself.

14. Such claims also explain the elements of Hume's often overlooked liberalism—the condemnation of slavery, the rights of individuals to the fruits of their own labor, a concern for a relatively wide distribution of property. For an example where, “consistent with equity,” necessity justifies redistribution of goods—and thus a suspension of the normal rules of justice similar to rebellion—see Enquiries, p. 186.Google Scholar

15. Forbes, Duncan, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 93–94.Google Scholar

16. Hume immediately qualifies the excessively optimistic character of this claim: it is is possible for a dictator to rule a large people with a small army or praetorian guard. That dictator must rule his army with opinion and not force, however.

17. The History provides an excellent illustration of what Hume means. To understand the events of the 17th century, We must understand the “general, but insensible revolution” in “the minds of men throughout Europe, but especially in England” that led them to the love of liberty (H V, 45: 18). Hume tells us that the general consensus about passive obedience under Elizabeth secured “the slavery the people” more effectively than “even these branches of prerogative” (H IV, Appendix III: 367–68). This almost unnoticed revolution in public opinion preceded and prepared for the more obvious political revolutions. For a similar treatment of the theme of public opinion in general, see Federalist, No. 49.

18. Consider Hume's identification of another imposture of the rulers: “We find, that magistrates are so far from deriving their authority, and the obligation to obedience in their subjects, from the foundation of a promise or an original contract, that they conceal, as far as possible, from their people, especially from the vulgar, that they have their origin from thence” (T 547). The concealment of the magistrates and our “natural” supposition that they are born to rule thus intertwine. The sources of our submission to tyranny Hume quietly notes are closely connected to his discussion of why we tend to believe riches and power are signs of virtue (T 357–62).

19. Postema correctly notes: “What is most fundamental to legitimacy, for Hume … is not the constitution's being traceable back to ancient times, but the fact of its present wide acceptance … it is not the objective fact of the constitution's antiquity that is important, but rather the fact that the constitution is commonly regarded as immemorial. This is not the expression of political cynicism; it is merely the (pragmatic conservative) view that the most important thing for society is that lines of authority be absolutely clear, settled, and matters for common knowledge” (Bentham and the Common Law Tradition [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], p. 90).Google Scholar

20. Baier, Annette has some helpful comments on the “silence of the laws” in A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 265–67.Google Scholar

21. For a similar argument, see Storing's, Herbert interpretation of Blackstone: “Blackstone insists that, ‘however just this conclusion [the right of revolution] maybe in theory’—and it is just in Blackstone's theory for precisely the same reasons that it is just in Locke's—‘we cannot practically adopt it, nor take any legal steps for carrying into execution, under any dispensation of government at present actually existing” (see Toward a More Perfect Union, ed. Bessette, Joseph [Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1995], p. 228).Google Scholar

22. Here I disagree with Duncan Forbes. He argues that the direct threat to a person's well being exhausts the legitimate instances of rebellion and inexplicably dismisses Hume's references to “public good” and constitutional barriers as legitimate triggers for rebellion on the grounds that these are inconsistent with the account he has ascribed to Hume. See Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 100–101Google Scholar

23. Donald Livingston has used Hume's discussions of resistance as the basis for an argument about the resistance of local communities to the overweening power of the modern state. See Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, chaps. 13–14.Google Scholar Leaving aside his larger argument about modern politics, which involves considerations beyond the scope of this essay, it is fair to say that Livingston overlooks these Humean objections to the institutionalization of the right of resistance. Questions of which secessions are legitimate would necessarily provoke as much controversy as the right of resistance and thus all the problems that compel the laws to be silent on this topic. To paraphrase Burke, the abstract perfection of such schemes is their practical defect. Nonetheless, these doubts about an institutional solution do not entail the claim that no exit or dissolution of a modern state is ever legitimate or prudent. Despite Livingston's charges that his opponents are ideologically committed to the modern state, one can doubt, with Hume, that a constitutional right of resistance or secession can solve the fundamental problem and still recognize that sometimes divorce is preferable to an unhappy marriage.

24. However practically ineffective including the right of rebellion might be, there might still be educational benefits from it. But that is a different discussion.

25. For a similar argument about the American Bill of Rights, see Federalist, No. 84.

26. For an optimistic view, see Stewart, John B., Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, chaps. 5–6.Google Scholar For a less optimistic view, see Miller, David, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar

27. “All parties now reaped successively the melancholy pleasure of seeing the injuries which they had suffered, revenged on their enemies, and that too by the same arts which had been practiced against them” (H VI, 53).

28. It is here if anywhere that Manzer's interesting suggestions about constitutional science or wisdom find a purchase. See Manzer, Robert A., “Hume's Constitutionalism and the Identity of Constitutional Democracy,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996): 488–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Storing, Toward a More Perfect Union, p. 233.Google Scholar