Extended Sentiments and Enlarged Interests: Hume's Politics

Political Theory http://ptx.sagepub.com/ Book Review: Extended Sentiments and Enlarged Interests: Hume's Politics The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume's Polite Rhetoric, by Marc Hanvelt and Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England , by Andrew Sabl Ross Carroll Political Theory 2014 42: 377 DOI: 10.1177/0090591714522199 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/42/3/377.citation Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Political Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ptx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ptx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - May 14, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 522199 PTXXXX10.1177/0090591714522199Political Theory research-article2014 Review Essay Book Reviews Extended Sentiments and Enlarged Interests: Hume’s Politics Political Theory 2014, Vol. 42(3) 377–388 © 2014 SAGE Publications Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav ptx.sagepub.com The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume’s Polite Rhetoric, by Marc Hanvelt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, by Andrew Sabl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Reviewed by: Ross Carroll, The College of William and Mary DOI: 10.1177/0090591714522199 David Hume’s History of England has never been especially well received by political theorists affiliated with liberalism. Thomas Jefferson considered it a “poison” and deemed Hume’s supposed whitewash of the Stuart monarchs to pose more of a threat to liberty than the “largest standing army.”1 John Stuart Mill gave Hume some credit for his “powers of narrative” but was otherwise utterly unimpressed: while acknowledging that Hume’s “reputation” as a profound historian was becoming “widely diffused,” he churlishly suggested that this was “of itself a sufficient proof that it is undeserved.”2 If such overt hostility has waned of late, it is only because it has been replaced by an attitude of profound indifference. As the Whig/Tory confrontation against which the History has often been read recedes ever further into the historical ether, so Hume’s History itself seems to have only grown in obsolescence. To contemporary political theory, certainly, the work that Hume devoted the largest part of his working life composing and revising seemed to have little of interest to say. Yet it is to this unwieldy six-volume text that Marc Hanvelt and Andrew Sabl have each looked in search of alternatives to a contemporary liberalism overburdened by rationalist, Kantian baggage. Methodologically their books have much in common. Both read the History (though Hanvelt looks beyond it to other of Hume’s works) in a manner best be described as reconstructive: that is, they attempt to pull together disparate fragments of a liberal political theory that Hume himself never set down in a single, more manageable treatise but which they believe is no less valuable for that. Similarities of Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 378 Political Theory 42(3) motivation and method aside, however, the political recommendations that emerge from these two studies are strikingly divergent, or even at odds. For Hanvelt, the modern political problematic Hume is best equipped to assist us with is that of “value pluralism” and the factionalism that arises from it (150). In the absence of normative consensus, Hanvelt suggests, Hume exhorts us to enter imaginatively into the sentiments of our co-citizens using an “extensive sympathy” that can ameliorate value conflicts (154). For Sabl, the intractability of value conflicts led Hume to ground political society on a different basis entirely, that of coordinated interest. Expressing pronounced doubts about how far modern citizens can plausibly be made to “extend” their sympathy, Sabl seeks only for them to “enlarge” their interests: that is, to be on the lookout for ways in which their own interests might be accommodated with those of others (52). Put otherwise, Hanvelt’s Hume would have us be less manipulative, more “just” and more “polite” in our dealings with one another (123). Sabl’s Hume would rest content if we would just recognize how advantageous the minimal coordination of our activities can be and strategize accordingly. In arriving at his version of Humean liberalism, Hanvelt has performed a valuable scholarly service by providing the first book-length account of Humean oratory. Several studies of Hume’s rhetoric, more broadly conceived, have been made before but Hanvelt breaks new ground by zeroing in on what Hume says about spoken eloquence as against the power of the written word. His argument is that Hume’s distaste for the sermonizing of fanatical preachers (evident from the Stuart volumes of the History in particular) left him wary of oratory but not entirely dismissive of its political potential. Rather than give up on eloquence as a frivolous adornment or tool of manipulation, Hume sought to revive the ancient public speaking of Demosthenes and modernize it for the benefit of a polite, commercial society. The result is a form of “high rhetoric” that combines Demosthenes’s talent for emotive imagery with modern commitments to truth (or accuracy) and a polite respect for the dignity of the listener (143). Hanvelt argues persuasively for why we should be interested in Hume’s high rhetoric. Not only is it an ethical “ideal” worth aspiring to in and of itself, it also productively upsets the neat dichotomy Neo-Kantian deliberative theorists have posited between “the rational persuasion of deliberation and the irrational manipulations of rhetoric” (163). That it is an “ideal” at all, however, is problematic. “High rhetoric” is Hanvelt’s own term of art: casual readers dipping into the History are far more likely to encounter examples of “low rhetoric,” a term Hume does employ in disparagement of fanatical speakers.3 Unperturbed by Hume’s reluctance to lay out a positive theory of Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 Review Essay 379 good oratory, Hanvelt fills in the gap himself by scrutinizing the Parliamentary speeches Hume commends and using the specific characteristics Hume admires in them to develop a Humean “conception” of high rhetoric (132). This is an innovative interpretive move, to be sure, but it begs the question as to why Hume himself wasn’t more forthcoming about distilling his views on oratory into a theoretical ideal with the kind of universal applicability Hanvelt seeks. There is a heavy irony in Hanvelt’s determination to weld Hume’s commentary on oratory into an ideal-theoretical type (or “idealized fantasy”) in order to counter the excessive abstraction of Kantian political theory (128). Although the depth to which Hanvelt is able to explore Hume’s stance on oratory is welcome, his decision to limit the discussion strictly to spoken rhetoric appears arbitrary. Particularly frustrating about this restriction is that it mandates a near total disregard for Hume’s own rhetorical practice. Hanvelt initially justifies the decision to look only at oratory on the basis of a number of passages in Hume’s brief essay “Of Eloquence.” To base such a weighty decision of interpretive strategy on such a slender selection of text is curious, not least given Hanvelt’s commitment to treat Hume’s “entire corpus as a single body of work” (8). But even in “Of Eloquence,” Hume seems more concerned with explaining how England, a country which ought to lie under the “dominion of eloquence,” had no great orators to boast of, rather than with showing how speech is more important politically than writing.4 Hanvelt is perfectly prepared to admit that Hume was deeply interested in the written word, noting in particular his fastidiousness about literary style and near compulsive revising of his own prose. Still, in a book devoted to better understanding how the publication of Hume’s corpus was “itself a political act,” the decision to sidestep Hume’s “own rhetorical choices” is puzzling (14 and 35). Hanvelt’s book is at its strongest when carefully contrasting Hume’s theorization of polite eloquence with the competing accounts of Adam Smith, George Campbell, and others. However, by grounding Hume’s theory of eloquence so thoroughly in the eighteenth century, he makes the task of bridging Hume’s concerns and our own all the more difficult. Because the “[ancient] rhetoric that Hume admired was of a different time and a very different social climate,” Hanvelt claims, Hume had to modernize it to make it conform to the demands of polite commercial society (128–29). Might we not say something similar of the Humean “high rhetoric” Hanvelt so admires? Part of the difficulty here is that Hanvelt wants to appeal primarily to contemporary democratic theorists, a group of readers already quite sensitive to the problem of manipulation and heartily committed to improving their own practice of democratic speech. Unfortunately, Hanvelt provides few specifics Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 380 Political Theory 42(3) on how these theorists might “persuade” the contemporary equivalent of Hume’s fanatical preachers (Rush Limbaugh? Imams in radical mosques?) to cease their efforts at manipulation. Hume, Hanvelt says, “offers us an account of how we might act on the public stage in expressing our views and seeking to persuade others without resorting to manipulation” (163). But if the “we” here doesn’t extend much beyond a relatively narrow coterie of democratic theorists then it is unclear how the “same notion of politeness” that Hume defended can make much of an impression on the problem of fanaticism today (165). In Sabl’s game-theoretic reading of the History, virtues like politeness are decidedly of secondary importance. His extraordinarily painstaking and erudite study of the work in its six-volume entirety is bold to the extent that any project with the stated aim of “teasing out a coherent political theory story from a 1.3 million word book” needs to be (18). The political message Sabl seeks to convey is, however, deeply cautious. Those who might have hoped that a book about political crisis would shake us out of our unthinking attachment to prevailing constitutional norms, spurring us on to revolutionary agitation in the process, are bound to be disappointed. Sabl starts with Hume’s claim that when it comes to constitutions, the benefit of the doubt should usually be given to what is already “established” (1). For much of what follows, Sabl seeks to reawaken our sense of constitutions as hard-won political accomplishments rather than staid, antiquated frameworks unfit to meet the challenges of the future or irrevocably tainted by their violent or exclusionary origins. By implication, anyone pressing today for the overthrow of a constitutional order had better make sure that they can point to alternative conventions—already firmly rooted in their society’s customs—that stand a realistic chance of commanding popular allegiance once the old regime has been dispensed with. For Sabl, to cast away one constitutional form out of a sense of grievance (however well justified) alone, absent such ready-to-hand customary alternatives, is the “height of irresponsibility” (238). Irresponsible too are those (unnamed) radical political theorists who wish to increase our appetite for such a revolution at the expense of our fondness for peace and social order. Towards them Sabl’s tone is caustic: if you have ever wondered how many minutes a radical theorist would survive in a world without conventions of authority, the answer is apparently “five” (190). If this all is starting to sound a bit like Burke, then this is understandable. But as Sabl is at pains to point out, Hume would be the last to encourage us to approach constitutions with reverent Burkean awe and asks us instead to consider them coolly, as the best guarantors of our self-interest. Impossible Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 Review Essay 381 though it may be to hazard a game-theoretical reading of Burke, Sabl feels secure attempting one with Hume precisely because the History lends itself to thinking of constitutions as both produced by and facilitating what game theorists call self-interested “coordination.” What is satisfying about this term (as opposed to alternatives like “cooperation”) is that it has few metaphysical overtones. To say that human beings will seek out possibilities for coordination need not imply that they have an innate tendency towards mutual affection or assistance, only that they will search some means of collectively structuring their activities so as to avoid getting in the way of each other’s pursuits (we do not need to care much for each other in order to see the benefit of agreeing to drive on the same side of the road). Moreover, while game theory on its own can tell us persuasive stories about how such coordination is enabled under ideal-theoretical conditions, the genius of Hume’s contribution, as Sabl wants to show, is to reveal the messy process of how these conditions are established in the first place, or how the parameters of the “game” are set. At the core of Sabl’s argument is the notion that all coordination requires focal points of one sort or another. What Hume’s History reveals is that deep rooted constitutional conventions like Magna Carta and hereditary monarchy, however flawed they may appear according to some abstract standard of legitimacy, enable infinitely better coordination than what Sabl calls “crude focal points” such as the charisma of a single leader (125). Accordingly, the heroes we should most admire are not visionary founders endowed with Machiavellian virtù but rather those who espy in already existing conventions, however faintly recognized, the embryos of a sustainable constitutional settlement. Oliver Cromwell destroyed the English constitution by beheading its executive branch, but because he offered nothing in its stead apart from naked military force he is the anti-hero of Sabl’s narrative. Hume’s Henry VII, by contrast, who labored tirelessly if unspectacularly to ensure that his son’s throne would be recognized as an authoritative entitlement rather than the temporary spoil of an ever-renewable war, is heroic in his dull, plodding constitutionalism. By emphasizing the valuable role played by durable constitutional conventions in preventing violent contests for political control, Sabl invites us to look with renewed appreciation at mechanisms for transferring power that many have been tempted to write off as dysfunctional or symptomatic of institutional sclerosis. Under his Humean eye, the monotonous predictability of the U.S. electoral cycle, for example, might start to look positively virtuous. As David Runciman has recently reminded us, in spite of the enormous economic and environmental uncertainties facing us we can say with some Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 382 Political Theory 42(3) degree of confidence that on Tuesday, November 8, 2072, voters in America will take to the polls (though what kind of polls they will be using is anyone’s guess) to vote in presidential, congressional, and state elections.5 Citizens otherwise fiercely divided on everything from health care to immigration seem for the most part to concur on when elections should take place, what oaths should be administered to those elected, and (roughly speaking) what responsibilities attend each office. Hume, as Sabl reads him, would marvel at such a well-established and conventionally adhered to pattern of power transference. But should we? I have some doubts. In the first place, the bland predictability of U.S. governmental changeovers is a sign that perhaps political theorists need to look beyond constitutional conventions to economic and social changes in order to trace the most consequential shifts in power structures. Even the demise of one regime and its replacement by another can take place behind the backs of constitutionwatchers, as Hume himself hints. “It is well known,” he asserts in the Essays, “that death is unavoidable to the political as well as to the animal body” before going on to argue that his preferred method of “euthanasia” for the British constitution would be a drift into absolute monarchy (not out of any royalist zeal but because the kind of republic he had “reason to expect” in the 1750s would have resulted in civil war or the “tyranny of a faction”).6 Hume’s euthanasia metaphor serves as an important reminder that regimes do not always die violently in revolutions; they can also pass away slowly and unobtrusively, leaving their constitutional conventions and formal institutional trappings largely intact and still in command of some allegiance. By this alternative Humean logic, growing economic inequality, coupled with legal changes allowing the wealthy to convert their money into political power with ever-increasing ease (think Citizens United), could bring about the “death” of America as a democracy long before a majority of citizens have ceased to recognize the office of the President or lost faith in the separation of powers. Political scientists have already begun referring to the United States as an oligarchy, without heavy qualification.7 Perhaps anticipating such concerns, Sabl insists that Hume’s constitutional theory has built-in flexibility. Newly empowered social groups will clamor for adequate representation of their interests, and it is a sorry (and ultimately doomed) constitutional convention that will not bend to accommodate such shifts. Nor does Sabl think that established constitutions should necessarily persist forever. If, he argues, “new political discoveries” born of experience and widely recognized have clearly rendered a constitutional convention obsolete then that convention will start to “erode” (238). But again Sabl seems to underestimate the significant time lag that can occur between a Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 Review Essay 383 constitutional conventional actually becoming obsolete and a sufficient number of powerful citizens recognizing it as such and replacing it. The Levellers, through hard experience of political exclusion rather than airy speculation, saw the advantage of universal (male) suffrage without property qualifications but had their “new political discovery” quashed by Cromwell with Hume’s retrospective blessing.8 It would be nearly another three centuries before the convention that only the propertied have a stake in the state was replaced with something approximating the Levellers’ suggestion. Erosion, as any geologist will tell you, can be an unbearably slow process. That the Levellers could table such a proposal in the first place owed much, of course, to the 1641 revolution itself. Political theorists often study moments of revolution because, for all their violence, they offer unique opportunities for political concepts not yet sanctioned by custom to enter the scene. We can illustrate the point with one of Sabl’s own examples. The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, Sabl argues, were successful partly because citizens there had a notion of what basic human rights guaranteed by the state looked like, thus furnishing the revolutionaries with an alternative convention to rally their compatriots to. But he also argues that Hume would have opposed the French revolution, an event of undeniable importance in the growth of that very same notion of human rights. What Sabl overlooks is that revolutions, even (or especially) of the “irresponsible” sort, can forge ideas that later solidify into the conventions he urges us to look out for and protect. Sabl ends by loosely associating Hume with the contemporary realist Raymond Geuss, a theorist who has elsewhere predicted that the eighteenthcentury project of “criticism” will become an irrelevance as humanity descends into a violent struggle for natural resources.9 Hanvelt concludes his book by presenting the case of Hume, champion of an “open public sphere” and “conversation,” as illustrating the continued relevance of that same eighteenth-century project (162 and 165). That these two books chime so differently in their closing notes tells us something about the current preoccupations of political theory, and the contest between realist and normative approaches in particular. But it also tells us something about the attraction Hume continues to exert on those who refuse membership in the warring camps that political theorists frequently divide into. Hume’s History, read anew, reminds us that one can be a political realist without endorsing Hobbesian absolutism, or a deliberative democrat without embracing Kantian rationalism. These seem to be reasons enough for bringing an end to the neglect of Hume’s largest and most political work. Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014 384 Political Theory 42(3) Acknowledgment The author would like to thank Mary Dietz and Don Herzog for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Jefferson cited in Douglas L. Wilson, “Jefferson vs. Hume,” The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1989): 49, 53. J. S. Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XX, ed. John C. Robson and John C. Cairns (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 4. David Hume, History of England, vol. VI (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 3. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 99. David Runciman, “How Can It Work?: American Democracy,” London Review of Books 35, no. 6 (2013), 10. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, 51–53. Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211. Hume, in volume VI of the History, is not entirely hostile to the Levellers but he does express approval when their “tumultuous spirit” is repressed by Cromwell and calls them “fanaticks” in early editions of the Essays, never a neutral term for Hume. Hume, History of England, vol. VI, 12, and Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, 616. Raymond Geuss, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 184–85. Author Biography Ross Carroll is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government department at The College of William and Mary where he teaches political theory. He is currently writing a book on ridicule in modern political thought. Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, by Bernard Yack. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xi + 328 pp. Reviewed by: David Miller, University of Oxford, U.K DOI: 10.1177/0090591713499726 Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY on May 15, 2014