Did the American Founding Have a Humean Heart?
On April 29, 1778, two great figures of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire, met at the Paris Academy of Sciences. As Voltaire saw Franklin approaching, he declared “Behold the man who tamed the lightning!” Then, stretching his hands over the Philadelphian’s accompanying grandson, Voltaire anointed the young Franklin with the words “God and Liberty.”
The American delegation to Europe used this moment to great effect as a stroke of propaganda. In a bid to win greater diplomatic support from the royal courts where thinkers such as Voltaire were fashionable, Franklin sought to tie the newborn American Republic to the Enlightenment in European minds. But not every American was so enthusiastic about philosophes and radicals. In his latest book, University of Florida professor Aaron Zubia, for instance, cites Abigail Adams’s 1783 warning to her husband John about their sons’ education:
I have a thousand fears for my dear Boys as they rise into Life, the most critical period of which is I conceive, at the university; there infidelity abounds, both in example and precepts, there they imbibe the speicious arguments of a Voltaire a Hume and Mandevill. . . These are well calculated to intice a youth, not yet capable of investigating their principals, or answering their arguments. Thus is a youth puzzeld in Mazes and perplexed with error untill he is led to doubt, and from doubting to disbelief. Christianity gives not such a pleasing latitude to the passions. It is too pure, it teaches moderation humility and patience, which are incompatable, with the high Glow of Health, and the warm blood which riots in their veins.
The status of the Enlightenment in American politics is, ultimately, a source of great tension. For every Franklin or Jefferson who saw the Founding as the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought, one could cite an Adams or a Morris who may have offered a different, more counter-revolutionary account. Any final judgements about the Enlightenment and the Founding, though, must reckon with David Hume’s role in shaping the intellectual environment of the eighteenth century. It is for this reason, then, that Zubia’s book The Political Thought of David Hume (2024) can help us understand the nature of the American regime.
Zubia concludes that Abigail was probably right to worry about the moral influence David Hume may have had on her boys. Rather than upholding the traditional philosophic tenets of Western civilization as understood by Socrates, Cicero, and Augustine, Hume advanced an Epicurean critique of religion. Returning to that ancient school, he affirmed their goals of “freedom from the fear of the gods and freedom from the fear of death.” Instead of faith in either revealed or natural religion and the ideas of creation and providence, the skeptical Hume encouraged readers to put faith in their senses alone. This empiricism represented nothing less than a revolution against the principles that once had ordered the Western imagination.
Zubia goes on to convincingly argue that this modern Epicureanism has consequences for Hume’s political thought. Although the Scotsman is commonly considered a critic of social contract theory and even a “prophet of counterrevolution,” his skepticism places him squarely within the liberal tradition founded by Thomas Hobbes. Whatever critiques he offered of the fanciful contractarianism of his day, Hume nonetheless conceived of society as a sort of contract to secure justice—and a particular kind of justice at that.
It is no exaggeration to say that Hume’s vision of justice is bound up with his sense of progress. “Political science, from Hume’s perspective, is tasked with locating and improving,” Zubia writes, “man-made social and political institutions that are responsible for moving human beings from barbarism to civilization, or, stated in slightly different terms, all of which convey his meaning, from partiality to impartiality, from savagery to humanity, from warfare to peace.” Hume was an ardent defender of the British constitution, then, because he saw it as a sort of “end to history,” a final answer to the problem of politics.
Specifically, Hume privileged utility over what Zubia calls “the classical tradition of moral and political theorizing” about the Beautiful. In Hume’s account, the British constitution, with its checks and balances and commercializing spirit, lowered the aims of government from virtue to security in a way that was simply more conducive to life by orienting it to the here and now rather than any vague religious concept of eternity. As Zubia describes it, “Hume’s political theory provides an institutional formula by which self-interest, in the form of avarice and ambition, might redirect and restrain itself.”
This account of Hume’s political theory may sound strikingly familiar to American ears. Does it not remind us of Publius’s maxim in Federalist 51 that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”? Certainly in the rhetoric of The Federalist, we can trace the influence of Hume’s political thought. Elsewhere, for example, Publius disdains “the petty republics of Greece and Italy” for their inability to control faction and balance society—a notion remarkably similar to the outline of Hume’s view of antiquity Zubia provides. Is, then, a Humean imagination at the back of the American Constitution?
As any number of historians or political theorists have pointed out, though, the Founding is complex, and difficult to understand in its fullness. It was not simply a Humean moment, no matter the extent of Hume’s influence. Liberalism was but one force of many animating the American Revolution.
The clearest distinction between the regime the Founders built and Hume’s political thought is perhaps its religious dimension. “The religious fundamentals of the old Christian narrative are, in [Hume’s] writings,” Zubia writes, “replaced by economic fundamentals, which he thought characterized the modern world.” Although there may have been some among the Founders who would have affirmed this great replacement, many others argued that freedom is itself a spiritual good—not to be reduced to the materialist concerns of an Epicurean. For a true republic, self-government is not a good that can be bought or sold. That, at least, is the argument at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and its public theology regarding “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is present, too, in the writings of statesmen such as John Adams and George Washington. I would even assert that it can be found within the pages of The Federalist itself.
Toward the end of the book, Zubia offers a cautionary note about treating Hume as a conservative which I think is worth quoting at some length:
To strip political analysis of its philosophic foundations, though, is to define conservatism differently, to make it modern. It only demands that change take place slowly. It no longer defends the intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political heritage of the West, exemplified in the revelation of God in Jerusalem, the metaphysics and ethics of Athens, and the republicanism of Rome. Instead, conservatism is reduced to a narrow focus on the present, an antipathy towards the past, and a fear of rapid change. Clinging to the present, it denounces any radical proposal designed to dismantle the established order.
It seems to me that this narrow “conservatism”—really Epicureanism—can account for the sclerotic condition liberalism finds itself in today. All around us, in politics and society, a vapid materialism is choking out a more transcendent sense of human purpose and immaterial goods—let alone the summum bonum. Zubia’s book argues that this failure of the moral imagination can be attributed, at least in part, to David Hume and his modern revival of Epicurean skepticism. I find myself convinced.
All the same, conservatives must also understand that political power cannot be the sole or even primary tool for renewal. Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet memorably argued that statism and individualism go hand-in-hand; the more centralized power becomes, the more destructive it becomes of the “intermediary institutions” such as churches, family, or schools that can communicate a sense of continuity to a rising generation. Zubia writes that “in Hume’s narrative, the centralization of authority preceded the spirit of commerce chronologically. . . Government action, in other words, promoted the spirit of commerce.” Perhaps, then, the most radical answer to the crisis of modernity is not the coercive enforcement of some re-spiritualization, but rather a deconstruction of the liberal apparatus justified by social contract theory and Epicurean skepticism.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.
Featured image: Voltaire blessing Franklin's grandson, in the name of God and Liberty in painting (1889–1890) by Pedro Américo via Wikimedia Commons.
