Hume and Rousseau on Consent and Legitimacy

I’m not sure if Rousseau read Hume’s essay or not but my understanding is that the part of Hume’s view that Rawls rejects is the claim that the appeal to a social contract does nothing, is rather just an unnecessary and confusing shuffle while all the real work is done by an appeal to utility. Rawls clearly and (contra people like Simmons and Otsuka, I think, rightly) rejects actual consent accounts for reasons much like Hume suggests, but doesn’t think this means social contract accounts are just unclear ways at getting at over-all utility, as Hume thinks, for reasons like those suggested, but not fully worked out, by Rousseau.
(Of the Original Contract was first published, I think, in 1748 and Rousseau visited Hume in 1766 but the social contract had already been written by then. Other than just these bare dates I cannot offer any help.)

Rawls also has a nice discussion of Hume’s “On the original contract” in his (Rawls’s) _Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy_. He doesn’t explicitly discuss his own disagreement w/ Hume but does say what he thinks the limits of Hume’s attack on social contract views are. There’s no discussion of Rousseau there, though.

Matt, it’s been a while since I’ve read Hume, so feel free to tell me I’m just wrong here. However, I took Hume’s target to be the tacit consent element in Locke. If you take that line (i.e. that tacit consent is no real consent at all), you can also hold: (1) that actual consent can or even does legitimate, while holding (2) that under some conditions (lack of exit options would be one, coercion would be another) we cannot count empirical evidence of agreement as actual consent. That might well do the trick of dispatching actual consent as a criterion (necessary or sufficient) of political legitimacy. But for a political theory to be morally plausible, it’s got to take on board the fact that actual consent, when present, changes the moral landscape, and I’d think Hume would have to be read as taking that point. Is there room for that reading, or am I in disagreement with Hume here?

I think that the reception of Hume’s Essay at the time was less that it was a devastating criticism of contractarianism as such (which, prior to Rousseau’s SC, was not a major theme in 18th c. thought at all) than that it was a pretty devastating mockery of Whig ideology with its Lockean trappings and pretenses about the history of English government in particular. I don’t think the Essays in general were widely read in France (unlike the Enquiries), since they were perceived to be basically intra-British pieces of partisan commentary.

Hume does say that actual consent, when present, is a valid source of obligation.

Mark- You’re right that Hume accepts that actual consent can change the moral landscape. What I was getting at was that Hume did not think that consent, neither actual nor tacit, was necessary to ground political obligations- that thinking about consent here is a sort of distraction since it’s so rare that we have actual consent, and that political obligation is rather grounded in utility. (I’ve read him as skeptical of the special value of ‘actual’ consent in most cases, too, since there are not other options- for most people, even if they “actually” consent, since they have no other options this is a “your money or your life” form of consent, one that gives no moral validity. Given this, he thinks, talk of consent is usually just a distraction. It’s a rare and special case that it matters for political obligations at all, on Hume’s account, I think.

On the historical question (of who read what), I would think that it is very likely that Rousseau read Hume’s essay or at least had some familiarity with his views. This is not simply because once upon a time Rousseau met with Hume a decade or two later in Scotland, but because the two had corresponded previously on several occasions (or so I’ve been told) which led to Rousseau having some trust in Hume as a good friend. Or at least a good enough friend with whom to find safety from increasing persecution in Geneva and France. Not that it ended well: Rousseau came to believe Hume sided with Rousseau’s “enemies,” a charge (I believe) Hume very strenuously denied.

“On January 4, 1766, Rousseau left Paris with an old friend and a new one. The new one was Hume, whom he still barely knew.” Damrosch, _Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius,_ p. 406.

As far as I know, Hume and Rousseau did *not* have any direct correspondence before 1763 when they began discussing the possibility of Rousseau’s coming to Scotland. Not only do the first letters between them that year not convey any sense of previous personal acquaintance, but Rousseau seems only able to talk about how much he admires Scotland, with no particular personal reference to Hume at all; it’s not clear to me that R had much more than heard H’s name. Their correspondence was preceded by attempts by third parties to encourage Hume to make his invitation, again with no reference to prior acquaintance. Rousseau’s ostensible trust in Hume which he came to imagine Hume to have betrayed was entirely a post- _Social Contract_ phenomenon. And Rousseau didn’t seek Hume out for refuge; Hume extended the invitation.

Two of my favorite quotes from the aftermath:
“What has become of Rousseau? Has he gone abroad, because he cannot continue to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?” Smith to Hume

“Mean–while, it appears clearly, what I told you before, that he is no more mad at present, than he has been during the whole Course of his Life, and that he is capable of the same Efforts of Genius.” Hume to Smith.

I really doubt that Rousseau had, prior to writing the Social Contract, read Hume’s Essays.

I don’t think that Hume intended to suggest (a) a complete paucity of consent to political authority (i.e., genuinely voluntary agreement to the obligations of allegiance), either historically or in contemporary societies, (b) that such consent doesn’t bind morally when it is present, or (c) that binding consent cannot be given tacitly through one’s choice of continued residence. Hume concedes (perhaps arguendo, but nonetheless he concedes) the historical claims (by Locke, along with most of his prominent Calvinist predecessors) about government originating in agreements or contracts. Further, he was perfectly familiar with the widespread practice of requiring oaths of allegiance as a condition for entering various professions (e.g., teaching, the clergy, the military, law); and there is no suggestion that he thinks such oaths don’t bind those who make them. Hume famously argues that promises/contract/consent do bind us morally. And his rejection of the Lockean tacit consent argument is explicitly offered only to defeat the claim that continued residence can be thought to count as political consent for those who are poor, unskilled, or uneducated (and who thus lack realistic exit options). Hume and his friends (like Locke and his) could emigrate (relatively) freely, without great hardship; and I doubt that this escaped Hume’s notice. What Hume does intend to deny, I think, are (1) that consent is necessary for the typical subject to be bound by obligations of allegiance (since promissory obligations and obligations of allegiance are both “artificial”, deriving from the social instantiation of contingent human practices [the practices of promising and government, respectively], practices which depend for the binding power of their rules on the general utility of the practices, it makes no sense to say that the obligations of one practice [government] depend on obligations arising from the other [promising]); (2) that historical contracts of government bind subsequent generations (due partly to the history of conquest and usurpation that has voided historical contracts in every real society); and (3) that mere continued residence necessarily gives tacit consent, even in non-tyrannical societies (in light of continued residence being for some neither a free nor a fully informed act of agreement – that is, many people neither have real exit options nor understandtheir continued residence as giving consent). (Locke, of course, agrees with Hume on (2), and he ought to agree with him on (3)). The overall intention of Hume’s polemic, I think, is a biting critique of Whig politics and theory as both too historically oriented, too prone to implausibly find consent wherever their version of history required it, and too unconcerned with the importance of the general utility of settled government.

Thank you, Jacob, for setting the record straight. Why do you think Hume would extend an invitation to Rousseau in the first place, especially if they were hardly aware of each other?

Hume certainly knew Rousseau’s works, just not (as far as I can tell) the other way around. And Hume thought Rousseau a genius and an important philosopher, albeit wrong about nearly everything. They had overlapping social circles in Paris (even if not many of them were speaking to Rousseau by this point); Hume was well-disposed toward people being persecuted for offenses against religious sensibilities (and particularly against Calvinist ones, as Rousseau was at the time); and Hume was a good republic-of-letters type who felt some connection to other enlightenment philosophers as such.

Apparently the newish book about all this (Rousseau’s Dog) says there’s blame enough to go around for what ended up happening, but as I’ve always understood it, things started to go bad when Hume secured a British royal pension for Rousseau, with Rousseau’s encouragement; Rousseau then made a public show of turning it down such gross dependence on a king and accusing Hume of deliberately insulting him.