Harrington, Hume, and the Dilemmas of Republicanism

• In Event: Reimagining the Republic: Institutional Renewal & Virtue in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

David Hume’s political thought has been traditionally read as a rejection of classical republicanism (Conniff; Moore). As some scholars have pointed out, this interpretation is difficult to reconcile with the well-known fact that his essay Idea of a perfect commonwealth (1752) is largely a reworking of the constitutional model of James Harrington’s Oceana, commonly considered one of the main representatives of classical republicanism. They have suggested that we should see Hume as finding a complex compromise between civic humanism and modern liberty (Pocock; Robertson), or as trying to accommodate republican elements in a non-republican framework (Geuna; Charette). This paper argues that Hume’s debt to Harrington’s political thought is much more significant than has been hitherto thought, and that this has important implications for our understanding of Hume’s moral and political philosophy, as well as of the category of ‘republicanism’ more in general.

Two aspects suggest that reconsidering Hume’s relationship to Harrington can be useful. First, Hume’s Essays frequently either mention or hint at Harrington not just in the Idea but already from their first edition (1741). This suggests that the Idea is not an isolated and exceptional case, but part of a more wide-ranging engagement with the author of Oceana. Second, classical interpretations of the relationship between Hume and republicanism have often relied on the definition of republicanism as a virtue-centered political theory provided by John Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment. The historical and theoretical understanding of republicanism, however, has undergone extremely significant changes in recent decades. Not only has Pocock’s version of the story been challenged and rewritten – most notably by Quentin Skinner – but a proliferation of new and alternative ‘republicanisms’ has led to widespread disagreement on whether they can be reconciled in a unitary tradition.

Before tackling the Hume-Harrington relationship itself, I provide a new reading of some key aspects of Harrington’s thought. As various critics have argued (e.g. Davis; Scott; Sullivan), the defining trait of Harrington’s political theory is not its debt to Florentine humanism but a subordination of virtue to law. Even though I endorse this reading, I also claim that virtue retains an ambivalent but significant role in Harrington’s thought, according to which political morality is identified with abiding by constitutional and procedural rules. I then show that the view of the relationship between law and virtue developed by Hume’s Essays closely resembles Harrington’s. An examination of the occurrences in which the author of Oceana is explicitly mentioned or quoted suggests that he played a major role in inspiring Hume’s theory of the rule of law.

In the following section, I use the analysis of the moral role of politics provided by A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals to argue that the Scottish philosopher develops a remarkably Harringtonian conception of political virtue as shaped by law. This provides a new explanation for the centrality of the concept of moderation in Hume’s moral and political thought: institutional structures in the modern world work so well on their own that there is the need not to encourage public spirit, but rather to quell it.

If this reconstruction is right, it poses a dilemma for republican historiography: either republicanism is not a significant feature of Harrington’s political thought or Hume should be considered a republican too. Both options raise significant issues. If the first one is chosen, we should stop calling ‘republicans’ a wide range of thinkers and traditions that are now conventionally categorized as such. The second option points to the opposite problem: if Hume is a republican, it is difficult to see why most early modern thinkers should not be republicans. Recent approaches to the issue have indeed abandoned the restrictive assumption that a unitary Pocockian or Skinnerian tradition exists in favor of more comprehensive approaches, so that Machiavelli, Milton and Rousseau are now considered as ‘republican’ as Harrington and Montesquieu. If pretty much everyone (except possibly a handful of absolutists) is a republican, however, then no one is a republican. The Harrington-Hume connection thus reveals the need to rethink our current understanding of republicanism.

Author

• Gio Maria Tessarolo