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DAVID HUME AS A PROTO-WEBERIAN: COMMERCE, PROTESTANTISM, AND SECULAR CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Margaret Schabas
Margaret Schabas*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Canada
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Abstract

David Hume wrote prolifically and influentially on economics and was an enthusiast for the modern commercial era of manufacturing and global trade. As a vocal critic of the Church, and possibly a nonbeliever, Hume positioned commerce at the vanguard of secularism. I here argue that Hume broached ideas that gesture toward those offered by Max Weber in his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5). Hume discerned a strong correlation between economic flourishing and Protestantism, and he pointed to a “spirit of the age” that was built on modern commerce and fueled by religious tolerance. The Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, came under considerable attack by Hume, for fostering intolerance and draining and diverting funds. Hume recognized several of the dispositions that later appealed to Weber: an increased work ethic and tendency to frugality, enterprise, and investment in Protestant regions. A neo-Weberian literature now points to additional factors, the spread of literacy and the fostering of a network of trust among strangers, both of which Hume noted. Insofar as modern commerce both feeds upon and fosters more liberties and representative government, Hume also linked these with the advent and spread of Protestantism. My aim is not to suggest that these arguments have merit—there is good reason to question each and every assertion under the historical microscope—but rather to highlight the broader religious and cultural context in which Hume’s economics was broached.

Keywords

David HumeMax WeberProtestant Ethiccapitalismsecularism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Summer 2020 , pp. 190 - 212
Copyright
© Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2020

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the following for their input: Robert Brain, John Christopolous, Tim Costelloe, Mukesh Eswaran, James Harris, Michael Gill, Paul Russell, David Schmidtz, and Carl Wennerlind. Special thanks go to the anonymous referee and to the managing editor, Sarah Raskoff.

References

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EHU An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

EPM An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 [1751]).

THN A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1739–40]).

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5 See Susato, Ryu, “Hume’s Nuanced Defense of Luxury,” Hume Studies 32, no. 1 (2006): 167–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 See the collection in Wennerlind, Carl and Schabas, Margaret, eds., David Hume’s Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

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9 From 1753–54 until 1777, the twelve essays of the Political Discourses were reissued, and some were substantially revised or retitled, as part of what has come to be entitled Hume’s Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. There were several different titles for the collection, but on the Continent, the twelve translations between 1752 and 1776, mostly in the form of a book, preserved Hume’s initial title of Political Discourses.

10 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 1992 [1930])Google Scholar. Richard Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) also advanced this broad historical link, that Protestantism was a necessary condition for the emergence of Capitalism. Some scholars renamed the Weber thesis as the Weber-Tawney thesis. See for example Munro, John, “Tawney’s Century (1540–1640): The Roots of Modern Capitalist Entrepreneurship,” in Landes, David, Mokyr, Joel, and Baumol, William J., eds., The Invention of Enterprise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 107–55Google Scholar.

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13 The literature is extensive, but one leading example is Greif, Avner, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In general, the more historians probe into the archives of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the more apparent it becomes that various regions in Europe were monetized and engaged in nascent capitalist practices. Almost half the arable land in England in 1436, for example, was cultivated by gentry or yeoman, and not by the aristocracy, Church, or Crown.

14 Hume recognized the autonomy of the northern Italian cities, pointing specifically to the powerful Bank of St. George founded in Genoa in 1407 that essentially governed the state (E-24; see also E-88–92).

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37 See Mossner, Ernest Campbell, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 639Google Scholar. Hume had also obtained a crown pension for Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

38 See Michael B. Gill, “Hume’s Progressive View of Human Nature,” Hume Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 87–108.

39 Ignatieff, Michael, The Needs of Strangers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984)Google Scholar.

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42 Translated in Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1966), 24Google Scholar.

43 Its inventor, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1878, wrote the first book on Hume’s epistemology; moreover, this work influenced Huxley’s project to establish the theory of agnosticism. See Jiwon Byun, “Thomas Henry Huxley’s Agnostic Philosophy of Science,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Philosophy, University of British Columbia (2017). Mossner remarks on Hume’s agnosticism and unwillingness to identify with atheism. See Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 483–86. In his Early Memoranda, Hume spells out “three kinds of Atheists” with reference to ancient philosophers to illustrate each kind: Theodorus, the Epicureans, and Aristotle and the Stoics. See MEM 501.

44 Gaskin, J. G. A., “Hume on Religion,” in Norton, David Fate and Taylor, Jacqueline, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Hume, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 506Google Scholar. See also Gill, Michael B., The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.