The Legacy of David Hume for American Public Administration: Empiricism, Scepticism, And

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATION THEORY AND BEHAVIOR, 6(2), 281-303 SUMMER 2003

THE LEGACY OF DAVID HUME FOR AMERICAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: EMPIRICISM, SCEPTICISM, AND CONSTITUTIONALISM

Michael W. Spicer*

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the ideas of David Hume and their importance to American public administration writing and practice. Hume’s ideas on empiricism, scepticism, and constitutionalism have indirectly, via their impact on modern philosophy, encouraged both support for and criticism of empiricist approaches in public administration. Also, Hume's ideas on constitutionalism, because of their influence on the Founders' writings and design, provide an important legacy for the practice of public administration. The paper argues that Hume’s notion of mitigated scepticism, as well as his constitutional ideas, have continuing relevance for the study and practice of contemporary public administration.

INTRODUCTION

While David Hume is not widely cited in the public administration literature, an understanding and appreciation of his ideas are important to both the study and practice of American public administration. This is, in part, because his ideas about the character and limits of human knowledge and understanding have indirectly had important effects on public administration thought. Hume's ideas on knowledge are a creative mix of empiricism, a belief that all knowledge derives from our experience rather than our reason, and scepticism, a questioning of the reliability of our knowledge even when it is derived from experience. What I shall argue here ------

* Michael W. Spicer, Ph.D., is Professor in Public Administration, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. He is author of Public Administration and the State (University of Alabama Press, 2001) and The Founders, the Constitution, and Public Administration (Georgetown University Press, 1995). His research interests include public administration theory, political philosophy, and history.

Copyright © 2003 by PrAcademics Press

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is that while his empiricism has indirectly, through its influence on modern philosophy, significantly contributed to empiricist ways of thinking within public administration, his scepticism has also contributed to critiques of these ways of thinking. However, Hume’s contributions to American public administration go far beyond his ideas about the nature of knowledge. As I shall suggest here, Hume's political writings on constitutionalism may well have been crucial in helping shape our constitutional framework for governance and administration. Finally, I shall examine the continuing relevance of Hume’s ideas for public administrators as they seek to deal with the high degree of political fragmentation and conflict that seems likely to characterize American society for the foreseeable future.

HUME'S LIFE AND TIMES

In order to help the reader understand Hume's ideas better, I begin with a brief review of his life and times. Hume engaged in a variety of occupations during his life including being a tutor, a judge advocate, a military aide-de-camp, a librarian, a diplomat in France, and a senior civil servant. However, Hume, by his own account, "spent almost all" his life "in literary pursuits and occupations" (Hume, 1987, p. xxxi). Born in 1711 to what he termed a "good" but "not rich" Scottish family, he was "seized very early with a passion for literature" which was to become "the ruling passion" of his life and "the great source" of his "enjoyments" (pp. xxxii-xxxiii). Following a university education at Edinburgh and a short career in law, Hume soon "found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning" (p. xxxiii). Scholarly writing and in particular philosophical writing was the driving force through much of Hume's life.

In his mid-twenties, Hume wrote what is now regarded as his major philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature, which he subtitled "An Attempt to Introduce the Method of Experimental Reasoning into Moral Subjects" (Hume, 1978). In this work, Hume admitted to "an ambition" to contribute to "the instruction of mankind" and to acquire "a name" by his "inventions and discoveries" (p. 271). His philosophical work, however, was not highly regarded at the time by his contemporaries. Despite his attempts to advertise it by means of an anonymous abstract, this first work was ignored. It fell, as Hume termed it, "dead-born from the press" (Hume, 1987, p. xxxiv). Later it was sharply criticized both by philosophers and the

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clergy of the time for what was seen as its extreme scepticism regarding human understanding, morals, and religion. Hume attempted to recast and clarify much of his arguments in his two enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. However, his philosophical ideas continued to provoke controversy during his lifetime. Hume's ideas never received the academic respect to which he felt they were entitled. Indeed, he was rebuffed twice in his attempts to seek a university professorship; firstly, by Edinburgh University and then by Glasgow University.

While his academic colleagues were generally less than receptive to his philosophical work, Hume nonetheless earned a considerable world-wide reputation and celebrity as a writer, particularly in France. He also earned some measure of financial success from his many popular essays on political, moral, literary, and economic topics and from his History of England. In this regard, Hume was perhaps the first man of letters to write consciously for a popular audience as he benefited from the rising literacy of his age. His desire to write for a popular audience perhaps reflected his belief that philosophy was important to human affairs. He argued that "though a philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society" (Hume, 1963, p. 10). His works also undoubtedly reflected his own self-confessed "ruling passion," a "love of literary fame" (Hume, 1987, p. xl).

Hume was very much a product of his times. Firstly, he was a child of the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time of great energy and optimism regarding humanity and its capacity to use reason and science to improve the human condition. Hume was exposed at university to the "new philosophy" of Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. He clearly saw himself as a Newton of the moral sciences when he asked "But may we not hope, that philosophy, if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?" (Hume, 1963, p. 14).

Secondly, although Hume wrote sometimes in the style and with the enthusiasm of a philosopher of the Enlightenment, he was at the same time, like Locke and Berkeley, an empiricist. He rejected the belief of continental rationalist philosophers that a priori reasoning could be used to discover truths about the world. According to Hume, "the only solid foundation we can give" to the "science of man" is that of "experience and observation"

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(Hume, 1978, p. xvi). Hume argued that "we cannot go beyond experience" and that we should reject "as presumptuous and chimerical" any hypothesis "that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature" (p. xvii). He saw himself as carrying forward the empiricist tradition of "my Lord Bacon" and acknowledged the influences of "Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Mandeville, Mr. Hutchison, Dr. Butler, who, tho' they differ on many points among themselves, seem all to agree in founding their accurate dispositions of human nature intirely upon experience" (p. 646).

Thirdly, while rejecting Continental rationalism, Hume does seem to have been influenced by the philosophical scepticism of French thinkers, particularly Pierre Bayle. Hume argued that a degree of scepticism was "a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy, by preserving a proper impartiality in our judgements, and weaning our mind from all those prejudices, which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion” (1963, p. 150). Hume clearly rejected what he termed "excessive scepticism," but he did believe that a "mitigated scepticism" was useful in encouraging "a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty . . . in all kinds of scrutiny and decision" and in the "limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding" (pp. 161-162).

HUME'S EMPIRICISM

Perhaps the most important aspect of Hume's thought for modern philosophy is his empiricism. As noted above, empiricism is a belief that all our knowledge derives from experience or, as our contemporary philosophers might put it, from our sense-data. Hume's empiricism is captured most clearly in his distinction between our impressions, our "lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will," and our ideas, "our less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious" when we reflect on our impressions (Hume, 1963, p. 18). Hume argued that all our meaningful ideas about the world can only arise as a result of our impressions of it. For Hume, all ideas are derived from our impressions. In other words, what we understand or know of the world can only be based on the experience of our senses. As he noted, "we can never think of anything which we have not seen without us, or felt in our own minds" (Hume, 1978, pp. 647-648).

Since all our ideas must be derived from our impressions, Hume argued we cannot gain any knowledge of our world on the basis of a priori reasoning. For Hume, such reasoning can certainly be used to enquire into the relationship between ideas but not into that between facts since facts must be based in experience. The only meaningful propositions that can be derived on the basis of a priori reasoning are those of "Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic" (Hume, 1963, p. 25). A priori reasoning cannot demonstrate any matter of fact since "whatever is may not be" and "no negation of a fact can involve a contradiction" (1963, p. 164). In other words, since nothing that is possible in fact is contrary to logic, logic alone cannot provide us with knowledge of our world.

Hume's insistence here that our knowledge of the world can only be founded in our experience was central to his most important argument regarding cause and effect. Hume argued here that "all reasonings concerning matter of fact" are based on "the relation of Cause and Effect" (Hume, 1963, p. 26). Thus our judgements about facts inevitably involve cause and effect reasoning. "By means of that relation alone," according to Hume, "we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses" (p. 26). Such knowledge of cause and effect relationships can never be based on a priori reasoning. "The mind can always conceive of any effect to follow from any cause, and indeed any event to follow upon another" (Hume, 1978, p. 650). In other words, logic cannot dictate facts. Rather, our knowledge of cause and effect "arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other" (Hume, 1963, p. 27). Our knowledge of cause and effect arises, in other words, simply as a result of our past experience of one event being followed by another.

Hume argued also that there is no reason, on the basis of logic or experience, to believe that our past experience of particular cause and effect relations between events will necessarily provide any guide to the future. As Hume observed, "it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change, and than an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different or contrary effects" (Hume, 1963, p. 35). Furthermore, "arguments from experience" cannot prove the "resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance" (p. 38). Our reasonings concerning cause and effect are based, therefore, on no more than a simple inference that the past will repeat itself. For Hume, "We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always cojoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable" (Hume, 1978, p. 93).

Hume further argued that since our knowledge of cause and effect can only rest on past conjunctions of events, we cannot establish, either on the basis of logic or experience, the existence of any sort of "power, force, energy, or necessary connexion" between those objects (Hume, 1963, p. 62). According to Hume, "When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other" (p. 63). "One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them" (p. 74).

THE IMPACT OF HUME'S EMPIRICISM

By basing our knowledge of cause and effect on what we experience rather than on logic, Hume is advancing an argument for an empiricist view of knowledge and, indeed, this is one reason why interest in Hume among philosophers arose in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The influence of his empiricism is especially apparent with respect to modern analytic philosophy. These philosophers, who have included logical positivists and linguistic analysts, rejected Hume's psychological and atomistic approach to knowledge. They preferred instead to examine the meaningfulness of different types of propositions or statements. However, interestingly, their views on what we can and cannot know clearly draw on Hume's empiricism. In their eyes, Hume's argument that ideas can only be derived from impressions becomes equivalent to an argument that all meaningful statements about the world must be reducible to terms which refer to our experience.