The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination
By Aaron Alexander Zubia.
University of Notre Dame Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 386 pages, $70.
Reviewed by Kayla Bartsch.
A new book by Aaron Alexander Zubia, The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination, offers a masterful overview of the Scottish essayist’s contributions to––and influence over––modern political thought. Hume’s girthsome profile graces the cover, a cheeky reminder of the Scotsman’s penchant for the finer things. The humorous image, however, illuminates a key aspect of Hume’s project: his Epicurean preference for the things of this world over and against the things of heaven.
David Hume (1711-1776) is widely recognized as the author of such modern axioms as “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” and “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” And yet, as Zubia argues convincingly, Hume’s political vision is not entirely modern but resurrects and reinforces ideas native to the ancient Epicurean framework of empirical skepticism. Hume’s vision of politics, mankind, and truth itself was deeply shaped by Epicureanism, which has, in turn, shaped the modern imagination.
As Zubia writes, Hume, like Epicurus, “integrated skepticism and empiricism…to free philosophy from enslavement to theology and superstition.” Hume knew that the world must be despiritualized for liberalism’s founding myth to hold. In order for men of different, “reasonable” belief systems to live together harmoniously, the hold of religion over each individual had to be watered-down and subjugated to the “common-life.” In other words, Hume sought the removal of a metaphysical foundation from politics.
Writing in the shadows of Europe’s bloody wars of religion, Hume faulted differing theological beliefs for political discord. According to Hume, an individual’s virtue does not depend on his belief system but his sentiment. If the claims of Christianity, of Calvinism, Catholicism, and Presbyterianism could just be quieted, society could prosper.
In his History of England, Zubia argues, Hume presents a progressive understanding of civilizational advancement––a project to which he hopes to contribute. Society, for Hume, “is oriented toward economic ends.” Commercial prosperity, scientific innovation, and an increase of daily pleasures are the ends of Hume’s ideal polis. Hume’s History presents a civilization slowly but surely overcoming barbarism. However, religious and political ideologues threatened to veer society back towards the Dark Ages. For Hume, ideology (or, deeply held belief) of any kind is the great opponent to social prosperity.
And so, Hume evangelized against the evangelists. As Zubia writes, many of Hume’s contemporaries read the History “neither as a cyclical history nor as a defense of customary belief and opinion, but as an irreligious attempt to overcome vulgar beliefs and practices by changing the public mindset regarding the nature, origins, and purposes of social and political life.” Hume, Zubia argues, was a polemicist. He stripped the benevolent impact of Christianity––both on politics and on persons––from his History in an attempt to remove the theological foundations from England’s constitutional system. Crucially, Hume intertwined material and moral advancement, as he believed the latter naturally followed the former. The people did not need God to be good. The people simply needed gold.
However, not all of Hume’s contemporaries were convinced. Zubia weaves into his text the words of Hume’s critics, who prefigured the “postliberal” critics of today. Abigail Adams, Jonathan Edwards, Hannah More (an English playwright and moralist), and James Beattie (a Scottish philosopher) all voiced their concerns over Hume’s attempt to rip religion out of the foundations of England’s constitutional monarchy––and political philosophy itself.
Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, published in 1770, quickly became a bestseller. In the essay, Beattie defends the existence of God and challenges Hume’s attempt “to subvert principles which ought ever to be held sacred.” Both Jonathan Edwards and Abigail Adams feared Hume’s irreligious influence among the American youth––Abigail feared his influence upon her own sons. Zubia includes an excerpt of a letter, written by another concerned mother, who encourages her daughter to read Beattie as a defense against Hume’s “diabolical” philosophy.
An implicit criticism in Zubia’s text applies to our own time: America has become so comfortable in her philosophical materialism that she has forgotten her Christian conscience. In other words, Hume’s Epicurean evangelism was so successful that we moderns––whether on the Left or the Right––are content to weigh the merits of politics on material questions alone.
Hume is sometimes crowned a conservative due to his distaste for radical change and his respect of convention, but Zubia warns that conservatives ought not embrace the Scotsman blindly. Like a fish that doesn’t know it is wet, many conservatives aren’t aware of the liberal waters in which they swim. “The modern political Left and Right,” Zubia argues, “inhabit the same imaginative universe, one that departs from the classical, Christian conception of the person and that measures civilization by its advancement beyond the past.”
To define conservatism merely as the triumph of gradualism over radicalism––devoid of reference to transcendent truth—alchemizes the term. As Zubia writes, “to strip political analysis of its philosophic foundations, though, is to define conservatism differently, to make it modern. This kind of conservatism is safe for a liberal world.”
What Hume ultimately “conservatized,” Zubia argues, “was a liberal vision of society that privileged the…Epicurean vision of the utile and the dulce over the honestum.” This re-valuation is a standard component of the liberalism of today, an admixture of Benthamite utilitarianism and Rawlsian political liberalism.
Zubia’s analysis of Hume’s influence on Rawls towards the end of the book offers a particularly enlightening critique of our own political norms. “Rawls’s account of public reason,” Zubia writes, “requires that citizens in a pluralistic society abide by the duty of civility by using language that is understood and shared by all citizens when arguing in defense of public law and policy.” Hence, Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness was born: a concept universally recognizable and easily quantifiable that could be used to evaluate policy in a democracy, with no reference to a specific doctrine of the Good.
“Rawls assumed,” Zubia argues, “that politics exists as a separate sphere, detachable from theology and metaphysics.” By claiming to remove philosophy from the picture, Rawls “opted for a kind of political agnosticism.” However, Rawls’s “impartiality” still “cast God out of the moral and political universe.” Zubia rejects the possibility of such agnosticism. He leaves us with a dichotomy: “One cannot remain agnostic on the matter. One must take sides.”
Reading through the text, I could not help but wonder if Zubia believes Hume’s empirical skepticism has infiltrated every modern thinker.
I do fear Zubia was too hard on Kant, for one. Zubia argues that, although “the differences between Humean and Kantian philosophy outweigh the similarities,” for Kant, as for Hume, “the world is despiritualized.” Zubia looks at Kant through the eyes of Rawls. He writes, “the project of moral and political constructivism, for Kant and Rawls, respectively, rests on a conception of individuals as “free and equal legislating members” of the moral and political order. These individuals, if they are to enjoy autonomy, must not be bound by an external law—a prior and independent moral order—but only by the law they give themselves.” In this moral universe, man—not God—is master over man.
This is a strikingly different Kant than the one I knew as a student of John Hare at Yale, who argues that Kant has been largely secularized by his twentieth-century admirers (Rawls included) in a way that distorts the meaning of his texts. According to Hare, Kant does not wish to banish a biblically-informed moral order from the realm of human action, but to unify the moral concepts received from such revelation with those arrived at through pure reason. Hare writes that “Kant wants to use morality to translate as much as he can of special revelation [i.e. Scripture] into the language of reason. The translation exercise is going to show, if it is successful, that the two circles are indeed concentric, which is at least to say that they are consistent with each other. More than this, a life centred in one will also be centred in the other.”
Perhaps, then, Kant’s modern sin was the desire to undergo this translation project in the first place, and to deal in the language of reason rather than that of revelation. Zubia writes, “The language of utile rather than honestum prevails in our public political life. This language has enraptured the public mind, so that we hardly remember that there is an alternative. And when we do remember, the alternative likely strikes us as benighted, superstitious, or fanatical, just as Hume suggested. But our inability to recall the alternative does not mean that it is false.”
Zubia’s work evidences the impossibility of a “strictly political” social contract, as he demonstrates that scholars who have advanced such a view (Hobbes, Hume, and Rawls included) inevitably advance their own Godless philosophy with it.
This leads to the central question begged by Zubia’s book: Is the language of liberalism inherently secular? Or can elements of political liberalism, which combines social contractarian and utilitarian concepts, be built upon a metaphysics—a vocabulary—of the summum bonum rather than materialism?
Zubia offers a hopeful response to this question in the very last lines of the text. He observes that even Hume’s irreligious project cannot escape faith in something, for the Scotsman still professes faith in the intelligibility of the world—and in the reason of man. “If public political discourse under the doctrine of political liberalism already depends on an implicit, unstated faith in a broader conception of the world,” Zubia writes, “then it is not far-fetched to believe that we can reorient the political imagination, respiritualize the world, and return to the rule of honestum.” I dearly hope he is right.
Kayla Bartsch is a William F. Buckley, Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review and a former teaching assistant for Hudson Institute Political Studies. Born and raised in Minnesota, she now resides in Washington, D.C.
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
