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The British eighteenth-century debate about the foundation and limits of political obligation was structured by a fundamental opposition between Lockeanism, on the one hand, and Filmerianism on the other. Hume questioned both the internal coherence of contract theory and, more importantly for my purposes, its compatibility with experience and opinion. The Lockean principle that human beings are born free, that by nature we exist in a state of liberty, was according to Hume a philosophical fantasy. It is, on the contrary, a matter of everyday belief that we are born into a state of subjection. Here Hume agreed with Filmer. But of course Hume accepted neither the de facto theory of authority that Locke had found in Filmer nor Filmer’s absolutism.
Duncan Forbes claimed that in treatment of political obligation, 'Smith simply took over Hume's arguments'. This was an exaggeration. There is a distinction to be made between Smith's critique of social contract theory, which is indeed essentially a recapitulation of Hume's arguments, and his positive account of 'public jurisprudence'. Just because he was, in his lectures, laying out a comprehensive theory of right, Smith had more to say than Hume about the origins and scope of the rights of sovereigns and of subjects.
Smith filled out what Hume had left schematic, and, in the process created an unstable synthesis of Lockean and Filmerian understandings of the moral basis of political power. His project of an empirically grounded science of politics required that he acknowledge that here 'opinion' is fundamentally divided -- and divided against itself. Smith registered this tension in the foundation of political authority without trying to resolve it.
| Organization | University of St Andrews, U.K. |
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