The Opinion of Mankind by Sagar Paul;

Author:Sagar, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

We may conclude by reconnecting this evaluation of Hume’s underlying philosophical ambitions with the question of sovereignty and Hume’s wholesale omission of any such category. Sovereignty theory is fundamentally justification theory: it seeks to explain not only who has (or should have) ultimate political decision-making power, but more fundamentally who has (or should have) the legitimate authority to exercise that power. The sovereign, by virtue of being sovereign, is justified in using coercive force against those who do not obey his or her or its rightful authority, whilst those subject to sovereign power are not justified in resisting that sovereign’s directions or impositions, insofar as these fall within the remit of that rightful authority.

Since at least Hobbes, we have been accustomed to seeing sovereignty as a necessary feature of a theory of politics, and of the theory of the state in particular. Hobbes represents a particularly interesting case, because he seeks to provide a theory of sovereignty with recourse only to materials available from within a secular political theoretical framework.125 His is justification theory, but it does not posit any external justificatory ground by which human political practice is to be assessed. Hobbes attempted this by making consent the linchpin of his theory: the sovereign was such because all had consented to be held in awe by common power, even if such consent happened to be given in the utmost extremes of duress.126 Yet the expansive understanding of consent Hobbes relied upon to generate a purely internal standard of justification for sovereignty was predicated for its coherence upon his radically reductive view of freedom as the absence of physical impediments to movement.127 Insofar as one is unconvinced of the coherence or plausibility of that view, one will be doubtful that consent can in fact play the crucial role Hobbes assigns to it in the generation of sovereignty, or in the justificatory ambitions his theory of sovereignty embodies.128

Furthermore, Hobbes’s absolutist vision failed—as both Locke and Hume recognized—to properly configure the balance between utility and authority. Hobbes correctly identified that the primary task of the state was the provision of order and security, but he radically overestimated the threat posed by internal dissention whilst underestimating that posed by the rapacity of rulers. His system granted too much to authority, dangerously imperiling utility. As Locke famously remarked, to agree with Hobbes would be to think that “Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions,” a sentiment shared by Hume, and facilitated in both cases by less bellicose conceptions of human sociability.129

Locke’s alternative to Hobbes was to retain the justificatory ambitions of sovereignty theory (his preference was to speak of “supreme power”), locating the basis of that justification in consent, but now understood as the only mechanism that could generate legitimate relations of political authority between creatures created free and equal, and which took the place of Hobbes’s theory of

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