The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin
lower classes began to insist on a measure of equality, and the upper classes came to recognize in that demand a claim on their consciences. Those who welcomed change and novel solutions, that is, those who were “progressive,” became collectivists or socialists. They were so successful in converting others to their opinions that the activity of government has vastly expanded. The opposition, which has declined to move ahead—so the story runs—is led by “reactionaries,” who desire less government and long for a return to times past. They are the individualists or defenders of capitalism or perhaps laissez-faire. The image of modern politics is accordingly that of a debate. It is presumed to have two sides, and anyone who declares a political opinion is classified as either forward or backward.
While this image corresponds to something real, it is not altogether satisfying. It seems to be lacking a dimension. For not everyone who speaks on politics at any given moment may be addressing himself to the same issues. A dispute on how much government ought to do for social welfare may be related to a disagreement on what welfare comprises. There may be no independent clockwork which is wound up to answer political questions. Not only a man’s worldly interests, his compassion, or knowledge of objective circumstances may determine his political convictions. They may depend even more on his character, his tastes, his notion of the relation between man and God, his preference for a quite particular way of living.
If we look at modern politics from this point of view, the presumed debate between more government and less dissolves. Instead, political disagreement emerges as clusters of conversations. Party lines no longer seem to mark out groups of soul-mates, and the important divisions are not between progressives and reactionaries, or collectivists and individualists. The divisions are defined rather by basic differences in temperament—philosophers are opposed to artists, logicians to historians, puritans to pagans. The most striking change is no longer in the attitude toward the role of government, but in the conception of what sort of activity politics is.
How the conception of politics changed in England can be traced through the lives and work of four writers—David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb. Each represents a distinctive way of looking at politics, which has become intertwined with others and obscured in political practice, and yet remains a vital part of the political tradition in England. Nevertheless, each writer contributed to a transformed outlook on the nature of politics. It was first suggested by Jeremy Bentham; its shape was defined by John Stuart Mill; and the finished product appears in the work of Beatrice Webb. But the significance of what happened becomes plain only by comparison with the earlier view of David Hume.
The four writers are taken here to speak for something more than their individual preferences, but not for any mysterious reason. As people who meet together very often, whether directly or indirectly, tend to communicate to one another their convictions and inclinations, there is likely to be a kinship in any given time and place between the reactions and ideas even of very different sorts of people. And what is common to the group may be stated unusually well by some member. In this manner, Hume may be said to express better than anyone else the dominant attitude to politics in the eighteenth century. But it does not follow that Hume’s contemporaries all looked at politics exactly as he did, or for just the same reasons. Nor would any attempt to make an abstract of Hume’s outlook and call it “the eighteenth-century view” produce anything short of a monstrosity. One must see the portrait of Hume as one among many portraits of a family. The resemblance cannot be analysed or isolated. It is stronger in some faces than in others. Like a shadow’s, its outlines are never sharply defined, but somehow it can be discovered in all the family faces. In this sense, and only in this sense, the patterns found in the four writers may be considered generic patterns for their time, and the changes from one pattern to another may be said to represent a broad change in moral and political ideals.
What makes the differences among the four writers especially impressive is that in a way they all owe allegiance to the same intellectual tradition. The name utilitarian most readily comes to mind. They have all been called utilitarians, and they themselves have claimed some such kinship with one another. Bentham said he had discovered the idea of utility in Hume; Mill, who first made utilitarianism a popular name, was tutored by Bentham himself, as well as by Bentham’s chief disciple, James Mill; and the Webbs often liked to describe themselves and other Fabians as latter-day utilitarians. In fact, the name is misleading because it suggests that they all shared a common philosophy. But it does point to certain common sympathies. All these writers praised a common sense, matter-of-fact, concrete, experimental approach to human affairs. All tried to justify their arguments ultimately by referring to something that any man could see with his own eyes. It is even more important that their philosophies were inspired not by metaphysical convictions, but by moral preoccupations. What concerned them was how their ideas affected the world they lived in, rather than how completely they had captured or conformed to some abstract truth. Their ultimate objectives were not philosophical, but moral.
In temperament, too, the four have some important affinities. Although each summed up and reflected currents of thought and emotion common in his day, all had the reputation of being radical and all shocked their more conventional contemporaries. Each of them rebelled against what he had learned, or believed he had learned as a child. At the same time, all of them esteemed moderation and tolerance. There is among them no true revolutionary, no one who actually tried to blow up the house, no one who advocated or even welcomed the use of violence. While they all wished to influence practice, they hoped to do so through theory, and relied mainly on the power of the pen.
In these ways, all four are excellent representatives of what is distinctive in British political thinking. Nevertheless, the change that can be traced through their lives is a story of a departure from, a decline of, a uniquely British pattern.
The story not only begins with, but, in a way, rests on David Hume because he more than anyone else has given expression to the peculiar genius of British politics. The political outlook he voices lived and breathed most freely in the eighteenth century, in an elegant, witty, and careless civilization. Yet it was alive in Britain before the eighteenth century. And it has lived on to temper every other theory that has gained a hold there. It accounts for the curious, unexpected, incoherent mixture that any theory becomes when applied in Britain, and it has contributed at least as much as anything else to the unparalleled peaceful development of her political institutions.
Although Hume is best known today for having made a revolution in philosophy, his philosophy was designed to support a revolution in morals. He set out to destroy the traditional Christian view of man as divided between divine reason and brute passion, and directed his attack at the metaphysics that had since Plato’s time supported it. He proposed to show how the human powers that had hitherto been traced to a faculty that man shared with God could be accounted for otherwise, that man’s much vaunted reason was nothing that set him apart from the rest of nature, or required him to renounce his earthly connections. But as his attack on reason denied to man any possibility of discovering a rational warrant for his beliefs, Hume’s philosophy in effect undermined itself. He thereby involved philosophy in dilemmas from which it has not yet managed to escape. For himself, Hume solved the problem he had created in the simplest fashion, by retiring from the field and turning essayist and historian, teaching the moral spirit he admired by means of examples without the encumbrance of a doubtful epistemology.
But throughout, his view of the human condition remained unchanged. It was, as he saw it, neither good nor evil, neither unknowing nor omniscient; it could be pleasant, but never secure. His notion of goodness included all things that men love, honour, and enjoy, without elevating any one activity or kind of life above all others. If a man exercises courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom, he does, according to Hume, as much as can be expected of him. He is not required to transcend his nature, or to struggle against evil. There is no more harm in the passions than in the reason, and they naturally work together. Virtue flows from harmony and a disposition to heed natural sentiments.
The sternness in Hume was entirely reserved for one enemy, the puritan. The puritan believes man is a divided creature, that virtue consists in making brutish passion submit to divine reason; he feels certain he can penetrate the ultimate mystery of the universe and achieve a single unifying vision of life that will free him from uncertainty and confusion. He is righteous, austere,