Called “a degenerate son of science” by Thomas Jefferson and a “bungling lawgiver” by James Madison, Scottish philosopher David Hume was cited so often at the Constitutional Convention that delegates seemed to have committed his essays to memory. In this episode, we are sharing audio from a recent town hall program featuring Angela Coventry, author of Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed; Dennis Rasmussen, author of The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought; and Aaron Alexander Zubia, author of The Political Thought of David Hume, who discuss Hume’s philosophical legacy and its profound impact on the shaping of America. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates. This program was streamed live on January 29, 2024.
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Today’s episode was produced by Tanaya Tauber, Lana Ulrich, Bill Pollock. It was engineered by David Stotz and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Angela Coventry is professor of philosophy at Portland State University. She is the author of two books: Hume’s Theory of Causation: A Quasi-Realist Interpretation and Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed. She has co-edited David Hume: Morals, Politics and Society, with Andrew Valls; The Humean Mind, with Alex Sager; and co-wrote The Historical Dictionary of Hume’s Philosophy, with Kenneth Merrill. Coventry has also served as the vice president and executive secretary-treasurer of the Hume Society, as co-editor of the journal Hume Studies, and as the category editor for “David Hume” at PhilPapers.
Dennis Rasmussen is a professor of political science and the Hagerty Family Fellow at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is also co-director of Syracuse University’s Political Philosophy Program and is a senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. He is the author of five books, including The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought; Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders; and most recently, The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter.
Aaron Alexander Zubia is assistant professor of humanities at the University of Florida. He specializes in the moral and political philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American founding. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and Law & Liberty. He is the author of The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Angela Coventry, ed., A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects
- Dennis Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
- Aaron Alexander Zubia, The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination
- National Constitution Center Town Hall program, Montesquieu and the Constitution
- Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (2024)
- Hume Texts Online, https://davidhume.org/
- Federalist No. 10
- Alexander Hamilton, The Continentalist
- Federalist No. 85
Excerpt from Interview: Dennis Rasmussen on Madison's definition of the word faction and Hume's argument for the feasibility and benefits of large republics in controlling majority factions.
Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. We sometimes use the word faction to mean more or less party. Madison defines a faction as a group that is pursuing some, and that is detrimental either to the rights of other citizens or to what he calls the permanent and aggregate interests of the community, meaning the common good. So affection is by definition a negative group for, for Madison. The main burden of Federalist 10 is to show that only a large republic can adequately deal with the problem of majority faction. I think the two main sources for this idea for Madison are David Hume and his best friend, Adam Smith.
So you kindly mentioned the book I wrote on, on Hume and Smith's friendship. They were best friends for their entire adult lives, which is this amazing thing, right? Hume is again, this great philosopher Smith is maybe the history's most famous theorist of commercial society both kind of pre- both Hume and Smith prefigured Madison's argument in Federalist 10. Smith in the Wealth of Nations makes a similar argument about religious sects. But since this Hume, this, this discussion centers on Hume, let me talk about how Hume prefigures this argument of Madison's.
So Hume makes this argument very briefly. It's in an essay called Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, which is a sort of curious or unusual essay within Hume's corpus in so far as he is usually quite averse to the idea of striving for perfection in politics. But the key part for our purposes is just really a very short part. The second to last paragraph of the essay is almost a good summary of Madison's argument in Federalist 10. So in this paragraph, Hume argues in favor of the feasibility of a large republic. That is to say, a Republican government that would work in a big country like Britain or France in his time, that had previously been thought to be impossible, right?
Before Hume's essay, people had always assumed that republics are only feasible within small territories, small populations, something on the level of a Swiss Canton or a Greek city state or, or Italian city state. The idea being, well, if the people are gonna govern themselves or even choose their representatives, well then there can't be too many people. They can't be too spread out. If they are, then they won't form a close-knit community. They'll have different interests, different opinions, they'll split into groups, factions tear each other apart. And Hume is maybe the first figure in the whole Western tradition to argue that the contrary is true that republics could work even better on a large scale than they would on a small scale.
Why? He said, well, small republics are susceptible to the kind of changing whims of the people. They're susceptible to what Madison would call the majority faction, where the majority combines to oppress individuals, to oppress minorities. Whereas in a big, diverse republic, representatives can, as he puts it, refine. Madison, would use the same term, refine people's views, and their desires. That is to say correct for people's passions, their, their irrationality and that it's good that it's the, the people are, you know, there are more people, they're more spread out, that makes it harder for them to combine to a, an act of oppressive measures if there's a majority faction in the country.
So this is, again, Madison's argument in Federalist 10 in a nutshell. Madison spells out things at much greater length than Hume does. Again, it's just this one paragraph of this one essay. But in terms of purely practical impact, that might be the single most influential paragraph Hume never wrote to just the way it influenced Madison, and thus the whole American experiment.
Excerpt from Interview: Angela Coventry on the perspectives of both Hume and Madison on factions, highlighting their inevitability due to human nature and the necessity for a well-functioning government to manage them to prevent violence and disruption to society, with Madison proposing a solution based on the diversity of interests in American politics.
Angela Coventry: I think one of the things that I would add to that is that both Hume and Madison seem to think that factions are inevitable and they're gonna happen. And this is probably just due to human nature but I think also if you've got people that have different interests and different passions, different levels of wealth as well different amounts of property what you're gonna find is people are gonna group together between those who are most similar to them. And I think Hume thought that that could be a threat, like it could lead to the dismantling of the government it could lead to violence.
These are things that Hume definitely thought that the government should be able to control. And that seems to be when Madison starts, he says a well-functioning government should be able to stop the violence of factions. So very kind of clear cut, I think similarity in that this is something that is inevitable in society. And so that means if we're gonna talk about how we ought to be governed, then we have to talk about, well, how we actually gonna deal with something like factions.
Now, as you said, Madison thought that we could manage it by getting bigger, and he seems to have gotten that from Hume. So, the more diverse groups we have, the more people's interests are out there, it's gonna be the case that no one group can dominate the other. SI take it that for both of them, faction is absolutely central for any kind of well governed union. But it's something that has to be taken seriously because it's just gonna be something that happens when you have groups of people together.
Because we're together in a society, Hume says, we're dependent upon each other. So, we have to learn how best to live with each other. So, making sure that no one group can threaten the rights or the wellbeing of the community is of absolute importance. That's what I love about Madison's number 10 is that he starts right there. If we're gonna be world governed, we have to start with this. So, I think he was also worried about religious factions as well as political ones, but Madison is focused on political ones.
But notice that they both think that factions in moderation are okay, and it's okay to have moderate party affiliation. That's not a detriment at all. In fact, I think Hume says at one point, part of the English constitution, the upshot of that is that you're gonna have moderate factions that will come out of it, but the question arises, well, what do we do to curb that, the extreme factions? 'Cause Hume definitely wasn't a fan of extreme factions because violence threatened disruption to society. I think as Hume says, once we kind of like society, we want it to continue.
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