Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily com- municate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with unified
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strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concern, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel diffi- cult, and resistence impracticable.… When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
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Chapter 11
The Legacy of David Hume for American Public Administration:
Empiricism, Skepticism, and Constitutionalism
Michael W. Spicer
CONTENTS
Hume’s Life and Times ... 262 Hume’s Empiricism ... 264 The Impact of Hume’s Empiricism... 266 Hume’s Skepticism ... 268 The Impact of Hume’s Skepticism... 270 Hume’s Constitutionalism ... 272 The Impact of Hume’s Constitutionalism... 275 The Continuing Relevance of Hume’s Ideas ... 276 Notes ... 279
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262 Handbook of Organization Theory and Management
While David Hume is not widely cited in the public administration liter- ature, 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 admin- istration 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 skepticism, a questioning of the reliability of our knowledge even when it is derived from experience. What I shall argue here is that while his empiricism has indirectly, through its influence on modern philosophy, significantly contributed to empiricist ways of thinking within public administration, his skepticism has also contributed to cri- tiques 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 also suggest here, Hume’s political writings on constitutionalism may well have been crucial in helping shape our con- stitutional framework for governance and administration. Finally, I shall examine the continuing relevance of Hume’s ideas for public administra- tors 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
To better explicate Hume’s ideas, 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.”1 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.”2 Following a university education at Edinburgh and short career in law, Hume soon “found an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.”3 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, A Treatise of Human Nature, which he subtitled “An Attempt to Introduce the Method of Experimental Reasoning into Moral Subjects.” In this work, Hume admitted to “an ambition” to contribute to
“the instruction of mankind” and to acquire “a name” by his “inventions
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The Legacy of David Hume for American Public Administration 263
and discoveries.”4 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 fi rst work was ignored. It fell, as Hume termed it, “dead-born from the press.”5 Later it was sharply criticized both by philosophers and the clergy of the time for what was seen as its extreme skepticism regarding human understanding, morals, and religion. Hume attempted to recast and clarify much of his arguments in his two enquiries, An Enquiry Concerning Human Under- standing 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.”6 His works also undoubtedly reflected his own self-confessed “ruling passion,” a “love of literary fame.”7 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?”8
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 George 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
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and observation.”9 Hume argued that “we cannot go beyond experience”
and that we should reject “as presumptuous and chimerical” any hypoth- esis “that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature.”10 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.”11
Thirdly, while rejecting Continental rationalism, Hume does seem to have been influenced by the philosophical skepticism of French thinkers, particularly Pierre Bayle. Hume argued that a degree of skepticism 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.”12 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.”13
Hume’s Empiricism
Perhaps the most important aspect of Hume’s thought for modern phi- losophy is his empiricism. As already noted, 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.14 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 impres- sions. 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.”15
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 inquire 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,
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Algebra, and Arithmetic.”16 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.”17 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 con- cerning matter of fact” are based on “the relation of Cause and Effect.”18 Thus our judgements about facts inevitably involve cause-and-effect rea- soning. “By means of that relation alone,” according to Hume, “we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.”19 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.”20 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.”21 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 that an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different or contrary effects.”22 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.”23 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.”24 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.25 Accord- ing 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.”26 “One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them.”27
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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 last century. The influence of his empiricism is especially apparent with respect to modern analytic philosophy. These philosophers, who have included logical pos- itivists and linguistic analysts, rejected Hume’s psychological and atomistic approach to knowledge. They preferred instead to examine the mean- ingfulness 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 that refer to our experience.
Alfred Jules Ayer, for example, made clear that his logical positivist views “derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume.”28 For Ayer, like Hume, the only meaningful proposi- tions consist of the “a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics”
and “propositions concerning empirical matters of fact.”29 According to Ayer, following Hume, such propositions “cannot be confuted (that is, proven wrong) in experience” because “they do not make any assertion about the empirical world.”30 Rather, for a proposition to express “a genuine empirical hypothesis,” it is required that “some possible sense- experience be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood.”31 Furthermore, Ayer argues, “As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other,”32 or, in other words, “no general prop- osition referring to a matter of fact can ever be shown to be necessarily and universally true.”33
Hume’s ideas have, therefore, clearly influenced and encouraged modern empiricists. This being the case, not surprisingly, Humean ideas have also had an impact on public administration writing. Particularly important here is the work of Herbert Simon because of his r ole in advancing logical positivism in public administration and in the social sciences in general. Simon strongly embraced the positivist idea that the only meaningful scientific statements about the world are “statements about the observable world and the way in which it operates.”34 Such statements “may be tested to determine whether they are true or false.”35 For Simon, “To determine whether a proposition is correct, it must be directly compared with experience — with the facts — or it must lead by logical reasoning to other propositions that can be compared with
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experience.”36 This was why he was critical of the so-called “principles of administration,” terming them merely “proverbs.” Simon echoes here in many ways Hume’s critique of rationalism when he ar gues that
“because … studies of administration have been carried out without benefit of control or objective measurements of results, they have had to depend for their recommendations and conclusions upon a priori reasoning proceeding from ‘principles of administration.’”37
Drawing on logical positivism, Simon and others strengthened the belief among many that public administration could and would become a true science by following empiricist principles. This belief has mani- fested itself in a variety of ways, including an emphasis on behavioralist social science in the 1950s and 1960s, and an emphasis on policy analysis, cost-benefit analysis, management science, and systems analysis in the 1960s and 1970s. While this faith in the development of an empirical science of public administration is perhaps somewhat diminished now- adays, it remains an important element in the thinking of mainstream public administration.
As Dwight Waldo has observed, in public administration, “the belief that principles, in the sense of lawful regularities, can be discovered by scientific enquiry remains strong.”38 This is evidenced in the field by repeated calls over the past two decades or so for more rigorous empirical and quantitative research in public administration. For instance, in a study of public administration journal publications, David Houston and Sybil Delevan argue that “the more rigorous use of the quantitative methods advocated by mainstream social science may well be more useful in public administration than their current use suggests.”39 Laurence Lynn similarly has criticized much of public administration scholarship for its failure “to engage in empirical validation in any scientific sense” and has argued that
“engaging in empirical validation of predictions, conjectures, and state- ments is central to any scholarly activity directed at professional perfor- mance.”40 Although all of this empiricist enthusiasm cannot obviously be laid at the door of David Hume, a reasonable argument can be made that his ideas indirectly helped encourage a rigorous and tough-minded empir- icism that is still an important part of modern public administration.
At the same time, there are important differences between Hume’s empiricism and that of modern public administration writers. For one thing, the latter writers rarely if ever employ the historical approach that was so central to Hume’s political analysis. Hume wrote that “history is not only a valuable part of knowledge, but opens the door to many other parts, and affords materials to most of the sciences.”41 Furthermore, modern writers’ faith in empirical reasoning seems often much more pronounced than that of Hume. Would Hume, for example, have really endorsed the ambitious scientific agenda of modern writers, inspired by Simon, who
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seek “to design and evaluate institutions, mechanisms, and processes that convert collective will and public resources into social profit”?42 Hume, after all, observed that “To balance a state or society … is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it.”43 Also, despite his claim that politics could be “reduced to a science,”44 Hume believed that
“all political questions are infinitely complicated” and that “mixed and varied” and “unforeseen” consequences flow from “every measure.”45 While Hume was an empiricist, he was also keenly aware of the limits of empiricism and was, in this regard, a skeptic. It is to this skepticism that we now turn.
Hume’s Skepticism
Even as he advanced his empiricist ideas, Hume displayed his skepticism.
He established, as noted previously, there is no basis either in logic or experience for assuming either that past causal relations will be repeated in the future or that there is any type of necessary causal connection between events. According to Hume, the only basis, therefore, for our belief in causation is that of custom or habit. In Hume’s view, it is custom alone
“which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.”46 As Hume noted, “having found, in many instances, that any two kinds of objects, flame and heat, snow and cold, have always been conjoined together: if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses, the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe that such a quality does exist, and will discover itself upon a nearer approach.”47 Furthermore, any connection, “which we feel in our minds” between a cause and an effect arises not from any impression of a force connecting events, but simply because, “after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event to expect its usual attendant.”48 For Hume, custom or habit was “the great guide of human life.”49 Hume emphasized our belief that like effects will follow from like causes cannot be defended either on the basis of our reason or experience.
Instead, this belief is simply a “sentiment or feeling … excited by nature.”50 Such a belief is distinct from “the loose reveries of the fancy” or the imagination alone only in that it is “a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object.”51 It is “something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgement from the fictions of the imagi- nation.”52 It “gives them more weight and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; and renders them the governing principle of our actions.”53
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