Chomsky & David Hume & The American Constitution

 I have read little of Chomsky; I disagree with some points but agree with much. What I will not deny is his intellectual integrity or his intelligence. If you look at the posts listed under the label "philosophy", you will see that I am even more of an admirer of David Hume.

The following comes from Boston Review's interview with Chomsky, “The People Really Have the Power”.

DB: One of the topics you discuss in the book is the connection between David Hume, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, and Antonio Gramsci, the noted twentieth-century Marxist thinker. What’s that connection?

 NC: Hume was a great philosopher. He wrote an important essay, “Of the First Principles of Government” (1741), one of the classic texts on what we now call political philosophy or political science. He opens his study by raising a question. He’s surprised, he says, to see the “easiness” with which people subordinate themselves to power systems. That’s a mystery, because the people themselves really have the power. Why do they subject themselves to masters? The answer, he says, must be consent: the masters succeed in what we now call manufacturing consent. They keep the public in line by their belief that they must subordinate themselves to power systems. And he says this miracle occurs in all societies, no matter how brutal or how free.

Hume was writing in the wake of the first democratic revolution, the English revolutionof the mid-seventeenth century, which led to what we call the British constitution—basically, that the king will be subordinate to parliament. Parliament at that time basically meant merchants and manufacturers. Hume’s close friend, Adam Smith, wrote about the consequences of the revolution. In his own famous book The Wealth of Nations (1776), he pointed out that the now sovereign “merchants and manufacturers” are the true “masters of mankind.” They used their power to control the government and to ensure that their own interests are very well taken care of, no matter how “grievous” the effect on the people of England—and even worse, on those who are subject to what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” referring mainly to the British rule in India.

The year before Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the American Revolution broke out. About a decade later the American Constitution was formed, very much like during the first democratic uprising. That’s presented as a conflict between the king and parliament. And it ended, as I said, with the king being subordinate to parliament, the rising merchant and manufacturing class.

But that’s not the whole story. There was also the general public, which didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament. It was a lively pamphlet period. Itinerant workers and ministers reached much of the general public. Their pamphlets and talks called for being ruled by fellow countrymen, who know the people’s wants, not by knights and gentlemen who only want to oppress the people. They called for universal health, universal education, and many things. But they were ultimately crushed. Hume and Smith both wrote after the victory of the merchants and manufacturers in Britain—not only over the king, but over the general public.

This was reenacted in the American Constitution, as Michael Klarman documents in his book The Framers’ Coup (2016). The public wanted democracy. The Framers—wealthy men, nearly half of them slave owners—wanted to prevent the threat of democracy, much like the men of “best quality,” as they called themselves during the first democratic revolution. It didn’t take more than a few years for James Madison to realize what Smith had realized before. In 1791 he wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson in which he deplored the collapse of the democratic system that he hoped he had established—not too much democracy, but at least some. The stock-jobbers—in our day that means the financial institutions—had taken so much power, Madison deplored, that they had become the “tool and tyrant” of government. They work for government but they also control government, working for their own interests.

Many of the same problems exist today. The Gramscian version gives an account of the same principles in modern terms. And many of the same issues arise. So yes, there is a connection.

Yeah, think about that, dear reader.

sch 7/6