Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment by DeGabriele Peter;

Author:DeGabriele , Peter; [DeGabriele, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sovereign Politeness

When Hume discussed the constitutional tensions apparent in the debate over parliament’s right of remonstrance, he displayed some skepticism with regard to considerations of decorum and prudence being enough to restrain the ambitions of the commons. I now want to examine the way in which Hume narrates the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a triumph not of popular consent, but of what I will call sovereign politeness. As Nicholas Phillipson argues, “Hume ended the History by showing that it was William, not parliament, who played the decisive part in settling the shape of the Revolution monarchy.”32 William, in maintaining a prudent, sovereign silence about the formation of the revolution settlement declared himself sovereign avant la lettre and displayed the sort of polite decorum and prudence that the commons are unable to. Furthermore, it is his prudence, a refined and delicate act of political subtlety, that is able to move English society from the state of “extraordinary necessity” to the stability of civil society. In this account of the Glorious Revolution, then, it is not the voice of nature, which no man can avoid hearkening to, that stands at the origin of civil society, but the silence of the sovereign.

What is most interesting about the prudent silence that forms the basis of sovereign politeness is that it is itself a custom or manner that is highly delicate and refined. At the same time, however, it is necessarily present and active before the institution of civil society, as civil society cannot exist without it. Hume constructs a natural or originary politeness that is immediately present and produced without the influence of civil society. This is, in fact, not unlike Hume’s speculative discussion of the formation of social bonds in the Treatise in which men in the most primitive of states, possessed of the kind of sagacity and foresight usually difficult even for the most refined, spontaneously recognize that abstaining from the property of others will guarantee, in the future, the security of their own property. Hume argues in the Treatise that “men in their savage and solitary condition” are aware of their own misery, and “fores[ee] the advantages that wou’d result from society” and thus “seek each others company, and make an offer of mutual protection and assistance.” Hume thus “supposes” that these savages “are endowed with such sagacity as to perceive, that the chief impediment to this project of society and partnership lies in the avidity and selfishness of their natural temper.”33 Savage men are thus sensible of something before they have an impression of it, and Hume assumes a kind of foreknowledge or prudence in the most primitive of men.34 The benefits of society and its customs are made perceptible even to those who have not had any benefit of those customs in order to polish their rough edges and make them realize the advantages of society.

Hume’s construction of sovereign politeness is another approach to this problem. Rather than depending on the sagacity of the savage, Hume depends on

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