Knud Haakonssen’s first rate study of Adam Smith’s larger moral project starts not with Smith, but with his friend and fellow Scotsman, David Hume.¹ Of particular interest here are Hume’s idea of justice as the product of ‘unintended consequences’, its consequences for the universal nature of justice, and criticisms of the social contract theories popular in England and France at the time, courtesy Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others. Hume’s treatise is written for the man on the street, for the common-sense person, deigning most of the views of the philosophes — and of the ancients, too. Despite its scepticism, it is not nihilist; the implications are perhaps even more vindictive of certain general questions of order and hierarchy than one may expect from the likes of a sceptic. Haakonssen describes Hume’s project as a voyage to “explain how a common world is created out of private and subjective elements.”² While Hume’s conclusions, particularly those in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, leave ample to be desired and much to be feared, on some other counts his search is more agreeable. The questions he poses are far-sighted and probing, and for all purposes his scepticism produces a world where passion guides reason. He famously declares: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (2.3.3.4).³ Beneath this veneer of provocation and supposed iconoclasm is a more measured stance, one that is essential to the enterprise that is upon us, namely a more nuanced articulation of the views of his most famous ‘successor’, Adam Smith.

Hume starts with some basic propositions about the nature of morality, the most significant of which has to do with justice. Although Hume’s justice is an ‘artificial’ virtue, strictly speaking, it is also aided and abetted by nature in a way that is creates the possibility of a third source of origin between nature and artifice. Essential to this view is the the social nature of man, a pronouncement that does not go as far as Aristotle’s zōon politikon, but recognises that “moral psychology is incomprehensible if the individual is not seen in a social context.”⁴ Hume, in his attack on the ‘state of nature’ theorists, particularly and most obliquely toward Rousseau, instead posits that man’s “very first state and situation may justly be esteem’d social” (3.2.2.14). This is important, because there can be no root otherwise for a social existence, the likes of which make the conception of justice even possible: if the state of nature was truly so abundant, when “nature spontaneously produc’d her greatest delicacies” (3.2.2.15), and no one was left wanting for anything, justice would have had no reason to evolve. Man would have been a species with no understanding of that which is just, and that which is not, because it would never have to fend for itself, competing against others to satisfy its wants, or, in Hume’s verbiage, ‘necessities’. “If men,” Hume sardonically notes, “supply’d with every thing in the same abundance, or if every one had the same affection and tender regard for every one as for himself; justice and injustice wou’d be equally unknown among mankind” (3.2.2.17). It is not because of overpopulation or some other disastrous human occurrence or act of malfeasance that this situation has come about where abundance has been replaced with scarcity — for Hume, this fictional state never existed at all, because it had to do with man himself, and not with nature, strictly speaking. Hume proffers the example of a lion: despite its voracious appetite, nature has provided the lion such that “his advantages hold proportion with his wants” (3.2.2.2). The same goes for the sheep and the ox. But nature has been cruel to man: she has created in him “numberless wants and necessities” but endowed him with “slender means” to fulfil them (3.2.2.2). This is the prime mover of man’s social life: his very existence is predicated upon his acknowledge and cooperation with others.

This scarcity could be understood in a more primeval and primitivistic manner, and in relation to age. Hume is particularly interested in the latter, especially insofar as it provides an almost intuitive pathway to the family and then upward to more complex forms of social organisation, culminating in government. It is in the family, where parents inculcate a love for society in general: “custom and habit operating on the tender minds of the children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it” (3.2.2.4). They see what the adults see, namely the three “inconveniences” that society remedies, ‘force’, ‘ability’, and ‘security’: “By the partition of employments, our ability encreases: And by mutual succour we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents” (3.2.2.3). It is from a young age, then, that a love for society and cooperation is enjoined and engrained; this does not require any significant insight, except the mere recognition that without social organisation, life will be (to borrow from Hobbes) “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” There is no state of nature, but only a social impetus created by man’s own deficiencies and imperfections. Thus, man begins organising socially, bound first by the ties of love; these families join together, and so on and so forth. The account is marvellously Aristotelean, and despite Hume’s snide remarks and distaste for the ancients, his account resembles in most important aspects the growth of society from the family in I.2 of the Politics:⁵ man and woman unite to reproduce, for that is nature’s imperative (1252a27–32); this expands into the family, which satisfies “daily recurrent needs” as the first “form of association naturally instituted” (1252b12–14); many families join together for a village, which aims at more than mere sustenance (1252b15–17); and many villages come together to form the polis (1252b27–30). Hume agrees with this evolutionary yet natural account of the polis and its growth, but he does not go so far as Aristotle does in proclaiming the end, the telos, of the polis to be the good life. Also of interest is Aristotle’s remark on the evolutionary process: “for this reason every polis exists by nature, just as did the earlier associations [from which it grew]” (1252b30–32) — a remark that I will return to later. But for the moment, it must only be noted that although Hume is sceptical as to the good life’s relationship to the polis, he links intrinsically with man’s social being the essential concept of justice. Haakonssen notes that for Hume, “this minimal social life, which men must necessarily lead, is sufficient to allow justice to emerge, and it is justice that creates the possibility for the development of social life on a larger scale.”⁶

There is, however, a paradox here, one that Hume is all too cognisant of. The paradox is resolved as such: “the sense of justice and injustice is not deriv’d from nature, but arises artificially, tho’ necessarily from education, and human conventions” (3.2.1.17), but here ‘natural’ is the opposite of ‘artificial’, for “in another sense of the word; as no principle of the human mind is more natural than a sense of virtue; so no virtue is more natural than justice” (3.2.1.19). The two strands that this theory of the origin of justice could have taken to this conclusion are either ‘rationalist’ or ‘evolutionary’, Haakonssen emphasises, with a particular and marked tendency toward the latter.⁷ The rationalistic approach is ruled out by Haakonssen after due mention of the methodological difficulties that it would pose to a study of Hume’s thought, and the flights of fancy it would require to take root. The evolutionary approach is, however, interesting: it is not purely through societal pressures, or arbitrary causes, as the constructivists and postmodernists would posit, but rather through a curious mix of nature and artifice that makes justice possible. Hume is unequivocal in stating that “Tho’ the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary” and even permits the existence of a law of nations (3.2.1.19), which he elucidates later (cf. 3.2.11). Although justice is not ‘caused’ by nature, strictly speaking, Hume steers clear of totalising meaningless, preferring a more nuanced approach than one may expect from a sceptic and contrarian.

Hume uses the insight to emphasise another key point, that “only a very low degree of rationality is involved in the origins of justice.”⁸ There is most certainly a disparity between justice’s cause and effects — especially when seen in light of Hume’s famed billiard table analogy — but there is more to portend to this than other competing views, and evolutionary forms of justice make a prominent occurrence in Adam Smith’s own evolutionary hypotheses in relation with the growth and development into commercial societies. It would not be too much of a stretch to use that sordid word that art historians and critics wantonly desecrate — influence — for the points of contact, similarities, and flow of information are copious, rich, and substantial. Haakonssen even terms Hume’s conception of justice “as an unintended consequence of individual human actions … one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of law.’⁹ Justice, is born out of a need to preserve what is one’s own, acquired through our “industry and good fortune” (3.2.2.7), and prevent its unintended alienation in face of ever-existing scarcity; from this recognition of one’s own industry in the acquisition of these ‘external goods’ comes the expectation that one ought not to do this to another, giving birth to the Golden Rule, and from thence to promises, conventions, obligations, and so on. In this sense, although the origin of justice is a social phenomenon, it is still universal: it arises from nature’s artifice. It is natural, yet artificial, social, yet universal. It is most certainly unique.

Before further examination of Hume’s views on justice and on government in the Treatise, this author hopes to contend with a minor point, of oblique and passing interest, that is to be found in a peculiar articulation of artifice in the Treatise, as pointed out by Haakonssen.¹⁰ Hume writes: “tho’ the cause of the establishment of these laws had been a regard for the public good, as much as the public good is their natural tendency, they wou’d still have been artificial, as being purposely contriv’d and directed to a certain end” (3.2.6.6). Haakonssen understands this to imply a certain conception of artificial not fully developed in Hume’s thought: “it is the fact that the rules of justice have a purpose or an end, that makes them artificial.”¹¹ If the Aristotelean polis had an end — which it did, in fact, for it was the good life — then according to Hume’s definition it could not belong to nature, for nature had no end. His letter to Francis Hutcheson, which Haakonssen quotes, evicts ‘final causes’ from the domain of nature and drags it into the realm of contrivance.¹² But clarity on the meaning of the word ‘nature’ in Hume’s thought, at least for yours truly, is only as clear as the famed skies of the British Isles, where sunlight is counted in hours, and obfuscation is the norm. And only nature could cause that.

For Haakonssen, this opens up a new avenue of thought that Hume flirts with en passant. He writes:

“If he had worked out what he implies in the passage quoted above, and in his whole theory of justice, as an ‘unintended consequence’ phenomenon, he would have seen that there is a third category between natural and artificial, which shares certain characteristics with both. The things in this category resemble natural phenomena in that they are unintended and to be explained in terms of efficient causes, and they resemble artificial phenomena in that they are the result of human action, including of course rational human action.”¹³

This, then, is where the question of order comes in. Because Hayek has monopolised the term ‘spontaneous order’, and this may have absolutely no relation whatsoever to his work, it will be substituted here for ‘extempore order’, an analogous expression with no baggage whatsoever of the libertarian kind. Extempore order is not the result of man stumbling about, groping and hoping for the best in the dark, or the expression of some heavenly plan for Hume, but a human contrivance, convention even, that is the product of reason of some form, universal, and almost without exception. It exists in more general terms; it can rely upon the cooperation of nature and artifice to give it support, like justice:

“… on the one hand, Hume can only recognize justice as justice in the form of absolutely general rules, for if there were any exceptions the system would break down. But on the other hand, if justice is created piecemeal by individual actions and imitation of such actions, then an intermediate state must be possible where individual acts, that are later recognized as being just, are able to gain ground without justice existing in the form of general rules, for those rules are the outcome of the individual acts of that particular kind gaining ground.”¹⁴

Hume’s solution to this contradiction was to propose the third state, if only in passing and expressed verbally but not in writing, if we are to take Haakonssen at his word. It is, in itself, a marvellous idea in its descriptive capacities: it seeks to explain the world, not prescribe solutions to ills, imaginary or real. Hume’s sceptical twentieth century counterpart, Michael Oakeshott, who had the ignominious distinction of having a review of his collection of essays, Rationalism in Politics, earn him the title of ‘The Lonely Nihilist’ by none other than Bernard Crick, wrote in that very book (albeit tucked away in a footnote) that the mistake with natural law was that most students of politics took it first and foremost and rather “improperly [—] as a guide to political conduct,” whereas in the first place its primary role was as “an explanation of political activity.”¹⁵ Hume’s philosophical speculations are backward looking, too; they seek to explain the current world, generally speaking, and in more abstract terms: this is the quest for the ‘historical’ search for justice (if such a thing could qualify as ‘historical’ in the manner of Gibbon, for example), in fundamental socio-natural phenomenon that exist. But explanation aside, Hume’s Treatise is not the tomification of conventions or rules or of law itself; it is merely a recognition of their existence, the reasons for such existence, and a general aid to understanding the world as it is without the slightest fancies, bereft of any sort of licit speculations. And it is this that enables Hume’s insights to be extended — that things are sometimes significantly greater than their causes, and while their causes may exist in time, their effects and rules are not necessarily socialised into relativism or nothingness. There is still an objective standard of justice and of natural law, however the empiricist natural law here may differ from more familiar Thomist conceptions or those pace Grotius.

In Hume, then, such an explanation of conduct meets its proper station, and in his empiricism we find a byword for en passant scepticism, dabbling but not lethal, tacitly reminiscent of another famed statement: “What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness: that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him.”¹⁶ Hume’s scepticism toward religion, and organised religion in particular, is evident in the book; as such even in his Dialogues it is my (measly) understanding that he differed from Burke in being an ardent deist; accusations of atheism found much traction against Hume, too. Perhaps the absence of religion or an overarching, benevolent god is absent en toto, but this does not ipso facto mean that Hume was an atheist, but if we are to be charitable to him, to assign to him the words of Grotius’ prolegomena. The philosophical solutions Hume offers in the book do not necessarily preclude the existence of a divine being, and if one’s objections to Hume are in that vein, one ought to take a step back and reconsider not the individual but the work in and in itself, else face the loss of some rather fine foie gras for the mind.

Now that the somewhat controversial issue of the Treatise’s relation with the divine has been kept in abeyance, there is the other issue: what sort of institutions, conventions, and rules would arise from Hume’s imagined social world, where socionatural phenomenon (for lack of a better or preexisting word) take root and articulate themselves in man. The one instance for this that Hume enumerates with care is that of government, devoting an entire section to its elucidation (3.2.7). The value of government lies in its ability to enforce the requirements of justice. The human condition is such that it only values that which is ‘contiguous’ and acts expediently to benefit from the contiguous without care for the effects of such actions in the long run; however, the consequences are “nevertheless real for being remote” (3.2.7.3). The student of economics make understand this to be a sort of moral articulation of the concept of the time value of money: money in the future is discounted and its value reduced vis-a-vis money in the present; analogously, man tends to think that the consequences of unjust actions are remote and discounts them, whereas they are in the present and ought to be valued more highly. This is Hume’s initial defence of government: that the government, “the persons, whom we call civil magistrates, kings and their ministers, our governors and rulers,” take it upon themselves as their primary task “render the observance of the laws of justice our nearest interest, and their violation our most remote” (3.2.7.6). This is the “origin of civil government and allegiance” (3.2.7.6). It is not the only concern, but it is the primary concern of government: the enforcement of justice (3.2.7.7). In 3.2.7.8, Hume gives another example, one recognisable as the tragedy of the commons: if maintenance of public goods and services, such as meadows, were left to individuals with no power of enforcement, nothing would ever get done unless there was both the will and the ability to do so. He then proclaims that “bridges are built; harbours open’d; ramparts rais’d; canals form’d; fleets equip’d; and armies disci- plin’d; every where, by the care of government” (3.2.7.8), in a passage eerily foreshadowing Adam Smith’s ‘roads and bridges’ statement in the Wealth of Nations as the proper role of government. Government makes this possible in spite of its being constituted of “men subject to all human infirmities” (3.2.7.8): it shifts the focus to more immediate concerns, and guides, abets, and enables such necessary infrastructure to be built and maintained for the use of all. Grounded speculation may lead to markets (but not necessarily industrial capitalism) and all sorts of other enterprises, but the realms of specious conjecture is best left to others.

The phrase Hume uses to describe the constituent elements of government is of special interest: “men subject to all human infirmities” (3.2.7.8). Individual reason is no challenge for the sum of the socionatural system through which order and justice evolves, albeit universally. This is a remarkable expression of a fundamental philosophical concept, one that ought to be given more attention: that man is imperfect and fallible. Having written about Anthony Quinton’s impressive book before, The Politics of Imperfection, I ought not to make further mention except to recommend it wholeheartedly. Hume’s focus, it must be noted, is on the intellectual imperfection of man: if the ancients thought that reason could conquer the passions and keep them in check, Hume argues something radical: that the passions reign supreme over reason. And for the vast majority of individuals, today, their reason is enslaved to their passions, as Hume so prominently puts it. He shows that even without the perfection required to tame the passions, there is hope — and civilised society can exist in those bounds, too. The sketches of government, justice, promises, and obligations, unique and dissonant as they may appear to the dutiful student of the ancients, still preserve the vitality, immediacy, and spirit of the ancients. Even with the doubts, the imperfection, and the scepticism, the family is upheld as essential, social existence is posited as the only existence possible, and justice and all sorts of fundamental concepts in political philosophy find their expression here. Some might even say that this treatise is mildly conservative in its implications, but not its methods; this is a sentiment I am rather comfortable with.