{"id":6590,"date":"2015-09-14T13:58:50","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T13:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/?p=6590"},"modified":"2020-06-20T22:38:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T22:38:49","slug":"humes-conception-of-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/2015\/09\/humes-conception-of-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Hume\u2019s Conception of Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Torben Mark Pedersen is a contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site,\u00a0Pedersen’s piece represents his\u00a0own insights and assessments and not necessarily those of the site.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Torben Mark Pedersen, Ph.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Hume was arguably the greatest thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. According to Hume, society is not \"hume\"<\/a>\u201cplanned from above\u201d according to the whims of some central architect (or group of architects), but has in fact \u201cemerged from below\u201d by the gradual transmission of customs and moral habits particular to that society to each new generation. In this way, the customs and mores of a given society contain a \u201chidden rationality\u201d that supersede the comprehension of any single individual. In other words, according to Hume, the underpinnings – the true workings of society – are not\u00a0planned or designed (nor are they the result of any \u201coriginal social contract,\u201d as Hobbes and Locke had said). Instead, society has gradually ordered itself by way of a centuries-long evolutionary process wherein best practices have been discovered and disseminated over time as individual groups learned that they could achieve more of their aims through cooperation than through conflict. Thus, one famous motto of the Scottish enlightenment is that “society is the result of human action but not of human design.”<\/p>\n

David Hume and the Reversal from State to Society<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his capacity as political thinker, Hume is famous for instigating \u201cthe reversal from state to society,\u201d meaning that he turned the attention of philosophy away from the state and onto the workings of civil society. With regards to the history of ideas, one can say that it was Hume who \u201cdiscovered\u201d civil society as a field of study that merited the attention of philosophers. Certainly, Hume was the first Western thinker who developed a theory pertaining to those areas of the political order that exist beyond the control\u00a0of the state: Morals, customs, norms, traditions, and the British Common Law. Among other things, Hume contributed a theory on how these components of civil society influence human behavior and thus help create a sense of community and cohesion that supervenes on the cognitive processes of the individual.<\/p>\n

With regard to Hume\u2019s predecessors, both Hobbes and Locke lacked an eye for how the inherited practices of civil society influence human sociability, and as a consequence, each depended on their unwitting\u00a0assumptions of what human nature\u00a0must be like. But Hume is different: He does not hinge his philosophy upon any one<\/em> conception of human nature, but allows for the fact that people are different. To Hume, there is not one human temperament, but many. Furthermore, in Hume\u2019s view, most men have the capacity to do good or bad, depending on the circumstances (and so the constitution of civil society becomes all the more important).<\/p>\n

Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Hume rejects all\u00a0thoughts of a so-called primordial social contract, where rulers and the ruled had supposedly gotten together in ancient times to\u00a0agree on the political constellation\u00a0of the state. Likewise, to\u00a0Hume, political rights are conventions, and these conventions have achieved legal protection over time because they are to\u00a0everyone’s benefit – rights are historical discoveries and not self-evident truths.<\/p>\n

For Hume, society was never \u201cordered\u201d or \u201cagreed to\u201d at any point in history, but simply grew from a multitude of individuals, each pursing their own, uncoordinated interests. The big question in Hume\u2019s philosophy is therefore how such a stable and largely self-regulating body as “society” could have emerged without central coordination and from a starting point resembling\u00a0chaos. Hume\u2019s answer is that the order of civil society has come about by an evolutionary process\u00a0whereby those civil practices that best satisfied the\u00a0sentiments of justice and fairness<\/a> among its participants\u00a0won out over others.<\/p>\n

Again, this process was not guided by the careful direction of insightful Heads of State, or by the deep thoughts of political philosophers: According to Hume, the advances of civil society were piecemeal\u00a0discoveries that were\u00a0made one by one as\u00a0men gradually discovered that it was in the interests of the majority to comply with common standards of justice and fairness, as long as others do the same.<\/p>\n

Thus, over time, informal promises between neighbors become codified into\u00a0the practice of\u00a0formal contractual obligations. Since the majority of the population in a well-functioning society will eventually discover that it is\u00a0also in their interest that the promises given in that society are generally kept, they will tend to support the codification of such\u00a0obligations, even if they are not themselves involved in contractual\u00a0feuds. For Hume, it is the premium that (most) civil societies place on\u00a0honesty that allows human cooperation to flourish\u00a0and human organization to\u00a0grow beyond the village level to\u00a0provide us with\u00a0civilization.<\/p>\n

As Hume sees it, the development of customs, morals, and law is admittedly rooted in self-interest. But at the same time, promoting these practices also has the consequence of promoting\u00a0altruistic and pro-social behavior. The\u00a0agreed-upon conventions of civil society have “hidden virtues,” such as teaching people self-control and moderation, as the satisfaction of immediate needs must be\u00a0postponed in favor of long-term interests. Common interests, customs, and morals create trust and cohesion between people and keep society in one piece, while putting a damper on political and religious conflicts to boot. Thus, the Bourgeois Virtues were never devised\u00a0as any sort of community project “from the start,” but were the unintended result of millions of people each\u00a0pursuing their own interests and discovering what worked best in the pursuit of them.<\/p>\n

Finally, it is worth pointing out that though Hume had great faith in the self-regulatory mechanisms of civil society, he\u00a0did not contend that civil society could stand alone: \u200b\u200bThe state is a necessity that\u00a0cannot be done away with. However,\u00a0Hume does prefer for the state to give civil society a large degree of autonomy, indeed mostly consigning itself to the enforcement of the law.<\/p>\n

Conclusion: Smith\u2019s Elaboration of Hume<\/strong><\/p>\n

As said, Hume was arguably the greatest thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. The intellectual contributions set forth by Hume were to a large extent elaborated on by his friend and younger colleague Adam Smith. These developments lent a more formal character to Hume’s observations and gave his philosophy more of a liberty-oriented bent.<\/p>\n

To Hume, a lenient state that allows for the autonomy of civil society\u00a0leads to the blossoming of morals, customs, culture and civilization – in short, it promotes the common good. In Smith’s treatment of Hume, this autonomy becomes more synonymous with freedom and the evolutionary and historical process by which best practices are discovered is referred to as “The System of Natural Liberty.” Smith stresses, however, that the benefits of such freedoms are not always self-evident, but must necessarily be seen in relation to the whole of society and in relation to the long term. In the shorter term, and in individual instances, the effects of freedom may well be negative, such as the traders of a certain profession colluding against the consumers. But in the long run\u00a0and as a whole, Smith contends that the effects of freedom upon both state and<\/em> society will always be positive.<\/p>\n

Hume’s\u00a0idea of \u200b\u200bsociety as a spontaneous order exists\u00a0in sharp contrast to the popular notion that politicians and philosophers can instigate ideal societies by way of\u00a0reason. Smith illustrates this idea by comparing such social engineers to people, “wise in their\u00a0own conceit,” who imagine that they can arrange the trillions of variables\u00a0that inhere in\u00a0society “as neatly\u00a0as the hand moves\u00a0the different pieces on a\u00a0chessboard.” But Smith contends that this is impossible:\u00a0Attempts to construct communities by way of rationally-designed morals and laws, devised\u00a0in the drawing room and forced upon society from above, must necessarily fail. As far as healthy communities go, they are always the\u00a0result of a lengthy historical process.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Image of Hume\u00a0in the article commissioned for this publication from artist\u00a0Georgios Magkakis.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Torben Mark Pedersen is a contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site,\u00a0Pedersen’s piece represents his\u00a0own insights and assessments and not necessarily those of the site. By Torben Mark Pedersen, Ph.D. David Hume was arguably the greatest thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. According to Hume, society is not \u201cplanned from[\u2026] Continue Reading<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6590"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6622,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions\/6622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}