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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2010
This article examines Russell Hardin's interpretation of Hume's argument that great social order depends on coordination convention. The main argument shows that despite an apparent move in that direction Hume's main argument is that justice and the other convention-based virtues rest on a cooperative convention which solves a prisoner's dilemma problem and that states are required when a society exceeds some small size because only states can solve the large number prisoner's dilemma problems that constitute the ‘problem of social order’. In this Hume's argument is indebted to the original form of this argument found in Hobbes's Leviathan.
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11 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 127.
12 Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, p. 33.
13 Hardin, David Hume, p. 110.
14 Hardin, David Hume, p. 110.
15 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 138, emphasis suppressed.
16 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 141.
17 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 92–3.
18 Hobbes Leviathan, p. 94.
19 Hardin, David Hume, p. 213.
20 Hardin's scepticism about Hobbes's claim that the obligation to obey the sovereign arises from covenant is created by his view that Hobbes ‘generally insists that contracts have value only if they will be enforced by a greater power’ (Hardin, David Hume, p. 213). For starters, the problem arises not from contracts, where the exchange is simultaneous, but from covenants, where one party has to perform first and the other is due to perform later. It is perfectly true (though Hardin does not quote it) that Hobbes said ‘covenants without the sword are but words’. But the sword comes in not to compel obedience but to provide the background condition of assurance that makes the covenant a valid one. Hence, even in the state of nature a covenant is binding on the second party that is due to perform ‘where one of the parties has performed already’. The other condition that makes a covenant valid is ‘where there is Power to make him performe’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 102). And we should be clear that the ‘him’ is the party that is due to perform second. Thus, the sovereign supplies the guarantee that makes the covenant to obey it valid.
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23 Hume, Enquiries, p. 210, n. 1.
24 Hume, Enquiries, p. 211.
25 Hardin, David Hume, p. 106.
26 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 109.
27 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 105, emphasis suppressed.
28 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 106, emphasis suppressed.
29 Hardin, David Hume, p. 105.
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31 Hardin, David Hume, p. 83.
32 Lewis, Convention, p.68.
33 Lewis, Convention, p. 14.
34 Lewis, Convention, pp. 6 and 44–5.
35 Hardin, David Hume, p. 86.
36 Hume, Enquiries, p. 306, emphasis supplied.
37 Lewis, Convention, pp. 5–8, 44 and 48–51.
38 Hume, Enquiries, p. 306.
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40 Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
41 Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
42 Hume, Treatise, pp. 538–39. The ramparts, armies and fleets are paradigmatic public goods. But the bridges could be paid for by tolls (and still are in some places), while the canals could be paid for by barges and the harbours by shipping that uses it, though it might have been hard in a relatively undeveloped economy to raise the money up front to pay for carrying out these works before there would be any offsetting revenue stream. (But turnpikes illustrate the possibility of building toll roads privately, even in the eighteenth century.) However, to the army and navy might be added the police and the entire criminal justice system, and we could replace harbours with lighthouses. Of course, a state is still required to enforce the collection of user charges but this is quite different from the state's having to fund and carry out these projects with tax money.
43 Hume, Treatise, p. 490, emphasis in original.
44 Hume, Treatise, p. 497.
45 Hume, Treatise, p. 534.
46 Hume, Treatise, p. 499.
47 Hume, Treatise, p. 537.
48 Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
49 Hardin, David Hume, p. 231.
50 Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
51 Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
52 Hume, Treatise, p. 538.
53 Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
54 Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
55 It is not easy to reconcile Hume's explicit statement that ‘government’ takes its origins in protecting property rights with his suggestion in the Treatise, which is also the line adopted in the essay ‘Of the Origin of Government’, that states originated in the need for members of small-scale societies to band together in order to fight their neighbours, see Hume, , ‘Of the Origin of Government’, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, revised edn., ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 37–41Google Scholar. According to Hume, hunter-gatherers do not have enough portable possessions to make it worth the while of the members of the group to fight over them: ‘An Indian is but little tempted to dispossess another of his hut, or steal his bow’ (Hume, Treatise, p. 539). But Hume believes that warfare between such groups will nevertheless occur, though it is not apparent what these societies would be fighting about, since they would have no cause for conflict over possessions. Be that as it may, Hume picks up on ‘Indians’ again to explain the remote origins of states. He says that ‘in the American tribes, . . . men . . . never pay submission to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their captain enjoys a shadow of authority, which he loses after their return from the field, and the establishment of peace with the neighbouring tribes’ (Hume, Treatise, p. 540). The normal state of these societies, then, would be one lacking government, but in which justice, that is, ‘the observation of those three fundamental laws concerning the stability of possession, its translation by consent, and the performance of promises’, was maintained in the absence of coercion (Hume, Treatise, p. 541). I have to confess that Hume seems to me to be running two alternative accounts, deriving the origin of government from the need to secure property in one place and from the exigencies of inter-societal warfare in another. For the present purpose, perhaps all that matters is that we can say that the need to secure property certainly stands up as an adequate basis for a state, even if there is another basis as well. Hardin, incidentally, refers only to the version in which ‘the rise of government . . . was to secure defense against foreign attackers’ (Hardin, David Hume, p. 212, emphasis suppressed).
56 Hardin, David Hume, p. 121.
57 Olson, M. Jr, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar.
58 Hardin, David Hume, p. 121.
59 Hardin, David Hume, p. 122.
60 Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
61 Hardin, David Hume, p. 123.
62 Hardin, David Hume, p. 91.
63 Hardin, David Hume, p. 90.
64 Lewis, Convention, p. 43.
65 For Hume, agreements between two people will count as conventions. His two men agree (not promise), he says, to row the boat together by convention. Similarly, two people could state mutual intentions (which fall short of promises) to go to a certain place at a certain time for lunch, and this would constitute a Humean convention. Lewis suggests that the two men in the boat get under the wire only because in the process of rowing they have to coordinate their timing: see Lewis, Convention, p. 44. This may be true for Lewis's own analysis of convention, but as far as Hobbes's account is concerned it is a gratuitous addition, since it is enough to establish a convention for the two men to agree to row together. Hardin buys in to the same idea as Lewis, that for a convention some coordinating beyond that of agreeing to row together is needed. But he reaches the opposite conclusion about the case from Lewis, saying that once they have agreed to row the two men have no alternative to synchronizing their efforts, so we do not really have a coordinating convention at all. It may be worth mentioning that in the Treatise Hume talks about convention and agreement in the same breath: the two men in a boat ‘pull the oars . . . by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other’. Even justice – respect for property – is indifferently a matter of convention or agreement: ‘thus justice establishes itself by a kind of convention or agreement; that is, by a sense of interest, suppos'd to be common to all, and where every single act is perform'd in expectation that others are to perform the like’ (Hume, Treatise, p. 498).
66 Hume, Treatise, p. 535.
67 Hardin, David Hume, p. 86, emphasis suppressed.
68 The political regime in small groups could be changed by agreement among the members of the group if Hume is right in saying that government arises out of the choice of the members of the society. ‘When men have once perceiv'd the necessity of government to maintain peace, and to execute justice, they wou'd naturally assemble together, wou'd chuse magistrates, determine their power, and promise them obedience. As a promise is suppos'd to be a bond or security already in use, and attended with a moral obligation, ’tis to be consider'd as the original sanction of government, and as the source of the first obligation to obedience’ (Hume, Treatise, p. 541). If this early form of government arises from actual agreement among group members, there is presumably no reason for a different choice not being made the next time round. For unlike Hobbes, Hume clearly does not maintain that a group can be said to act only if it has a sovereign to act for it. However, Hume's use of actual contract to get government going clashes with Hardin's claim that Hume does nothing but pour scorn on contract theories for the justification of the state: ‘for Hume the whole apparatus of contracting is a silly idea’ (Hardin, David Hume, p. 121). It is true that Hume does not think that the duty of ‘allegiance’ rests on mutual promises now. But his account of the origins of government is in all essentials identical with Hobbes's account of the origins of sovereigns by institution. Hardin is simply incorrect to say that for Hume ‘government arises from . . . convention and slow evolution’ (Hardin, David Hume, p. 214).
69 Hardin, David Hume, p. 184.
70 Hardin, David Hume, p. 184.
71 Hume, Enquiries, p. 282.
72 Hume, ‘Of the Origin of Government’, p. 38. Hume says that it is ‘according the imperfect way in which human affairs are conducted’ that the ‘sensible knave’ sees prospects of net gain (Hume, Enquiries, p. 282). This has to mean that Hume is talking about conditions here and now, with legal penalties attached to theft, fraud, embezzlement, and so on. It is not only the possibility of damaging social order that the knave has to put in the balance but the chance of being caught and punished. Indeed, one of Hume's counter-arguments is that knaves may overreach themselves and undertake further exploits that result in their being detected (Hume, Enquiries, p. 283).
73 R. Carroll, ‘Rampant Violence in Latin America's “Worst Epidemic”’, The Guardian, 9 October 2008, p. 23.
74 Dalrymple, W., The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (London, 1998), pp. 17 and 19Google Scholar.
75 G. Chamberlain, ‘Thousands Flee as a New Hindu Rampage brings Fire and Sword’, The Observer, 19 October 2008, p. 31.
76 Hardin, David Hume, p. 7.
77 Hume, Enquiries, p. 231.
78 Hume, Enquiries, p. 336.
79 Hardin, David Hume, pp. 31 and 164–5.
80 Hume, Enquiries, p. 270.
81 Hume, Enquiries, p. 343.
82 Hume, Enquiries, p. 343.
83 Hardin, David Hume, p. 7, quoting Hume, Enquiries, p. 177.
84 Hume, Treatise, p. 620.
85 Hume, Enquiries, pp. 303–4
86 Hume, Enquiries, pp. 218–19.
87 Hume, Enquiries, p. 219.
88 Hume, Enquiries, p. 304.
89 Hardin, David Hume, p. 62, table 3.1.
