Political Development and Political Thought

Abstract

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter’s normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today’s West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers’ objectives.

Introduction

Early modern European political theorists lived in environments that resembled what many researchers now call “developing countries,” which were substantially harsher ¹ places than are contemporary developed countries (the latter did not exist until at least the nineteenth century). These writers faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes (1588–1679), Hume (1711–76), and James Madison (1751–1836) as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Many contemporary readers of early modern political theory live in today’s liberal-democratic West. They are thus able to take for granted a (by historical standards) high level of political-economic development. As a consequence, given garden-variety psychological processes of adaptation, contemporary readers are liable to normalize this level of development and to overlook that early modern political theorists could not enjoy it. ² Reading early modern political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries can—this essay aims to show—off-set this tendency. Strictly speaking, projecting the largely post-1945 (see, e.g., Arndt 1981) language of development backward in time is anachronistic. However, this language is a useful shorthand for denoting several of the institutional design problems with which early modern political theorists were concerned, and this essay unabashedly uses it in this way.

The essay draws on an existing line of research by North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009) that distinguishes, in a highly schematic but analytically useful way, between “limited-access” and “open-access” states. ³ This line of research proceeds from the premise that every viable state beyond a modest threshold of social complexity must manage the problem of dispersed large-scale internal violence, ⁴ and that the way in which a state does this can and often does affect its institutional trajectory. ⁵ As North, Wallis, and Weingast (id.) have argued in detail, limited- and open-access states manage the problem of violence in importantly different ways. Limited-access states manage violence by assembling agents with the capacity to deploy significant force into a ruling coalition and then channeling state benefits to members of this coalition in proportion to their ability to fight. These states use restrictions on political and economic competition to create rents that they then distribute to agents with violence potential. This form of distribution incentivizes these agents to forswear force and instead to cooperate with the ruling coalition. The existence of pressure to create rents means that limited-access states severely restrict political and economic competition. They thus cannot sustain liberal democracy or a robust market economy. In contrast to limited-access states, open-access states exhibit high levels of economic specialization and market integration, both of which raise the cost of violence, thereby disincentivizing agents with violence potential from using it. Thus, these states can maintain peace without having to channel rents to these agents. In the more advanced cases, open-access states allow nearly all eligible citizens to enjoy state benefits, thereby fostering political and economic competition and enabling liberal democracy and robust markets. Whereas contemporary Westerners live in open-access states, early modern political theorists lived in environments that were closer to the limited-access model.

This essay proposes that understanding early modern political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Reading early modern political theorists without considering their location in (by contemporary Western standards) settings of limited political-economic development risks prematurely ascribing their normative prescriptions to straightforward error. Interpreting these theorists as limited-access writers, by contrast, clarifies some of their normative prescriptions that are likely otherwise to seem confusing or confused. Now, the essay does not attempt to demonstrate—using, for example, biographical data—that the theorists’ life circumstances caused them to issue the normative prescriptions that they did (e.g., “Hobbes argued y because x had occurred in his life”). The essay’s ambition is more modest: it is to show that adopting the interpretive conceit that early modern political theorists were limited-access writers offers a unique and useful window onto some of their normative objectives.

The following preliminary remarks preview the essay’s arguments, in Part II below, about Hobbes, Hume, and Madison. Hobbes advocated absolutism, and he did so partly on the basis of his belief that any type of division of power would necessarily cause war. In today’s developed countries, we know that division of power can co-exist with durable peace. But limited-access states face pressure to assemble agents with violence potential into a ruling coalition to maintain peace, so they often struggle safely to divide power. Reading Hobbes as a limited-access writer thus provides a cogent account of why he did not hold the contemporary view that dividing power is both feasible and desirable.

Hume defined justice primarily in terms of property rights, producing a definition that is, by contemporary Western standards, perversely thin. He did so partly on the basis of his belief that thick accounts of justice—accounts that emphasize desiderata such as equality and fairness—were not policy-relevant. As Hardin (1999; 2005) argued, in today’s developed countries, we know that thick accounts of justice can be translated into policy using, especially, progressive taxation. ⁶ But limited-access states face pressure to channel state benefits to agents with violence potential to secure their cooperation, so they are often hard-pressed to direct state resources to needy citizens. Reading Hume as a limited-access writer thus provides a credible explanation of why he did not hold the contemporary view that justice crucially encompasses desiderata such as equality and fairness.

Madison around 1787 advocated several counter-majoritarian institutions in the new national government of the United States. He did so partly on the basis of his belief that majority rule (by many but not all white men) might destabilize the new constitution and undermine the international reputation of what we now call “indirect democracy.” In today’s developed countries, we know that majority rule (with at least some counter-majoritarian constraints) can be sustained for multiple generations. But limited-access states face pressure to incentivize agents with violence potential to participate in the ruling coalition, so they often restrict political competition to coalition members. Reading Madison as a limited-access writer thus provides a realistic proposal about why he did not hold the contemporary view that majority rule is obviously long-run sustainable.

The preceding interpretations of Hobbes, Hume, and Madison are subject to falsification, and this essay does not exclude the possibility that (for example) Hobbes opposed division of power simply because he was despotic by disposition. Perhaps the essay’s most basic contribution is to suggest that, whether or not the political-economic constraints that early modern political theorists faced ultimately explain certain of their normative prescriptions, contemporary readers should consider and reject the possibility that they do before concluding that these theorists were straightforwardly in error.

The essay has two parts. Part I, which is preliminary, summarizes North’s, Wallis’s, and Weingast’s (2009) limited-access/open-access distinction. Part II, which is the essay’s core, applies this distinction to early modern political theory. It argues that interpreting figures such as Hobbes, Hume, and Madison as limited-access writers clarifies some of their normative prescriptions that are likely otherwise to seem confusing or confused.

Before proceeding, it may be helpful to state why the essay uses Hobbes, Hume, and Madison in particular to exemplify the larger set of early modern political theorists. First, because the relevant arguments of Hobbes, Hume, and Madison are interestingly different from each other in style and in subject matter, building the essay around these figures gives the paper an opportunity to illustrate the diversity of ways in which reading the political writers of the early modern period as limited-access writers can add interpretive value. Second, because Hobbes, Hume, and Madison continue to receive significant amounts of critical interest from contemporary readers, building the argument around them provides the essay with an opportunity to reference ongoing debates in political theory. Importantly, the essay’s general thesis—that reading early modern political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries clarifies some of their normative prescriptions—does not require Hobbes, Hume, or Madison. Consider, for instance, Locke (1632–1704) and Spinoza (1632–77). Reading Locke as a limited-access writer with a heightened concern about arbitrary government confiscation helps to elucidate his advocacy of the labor theory of property, an advocacy that may seem misplaced in the contemporary West (if one owns what one has labored to produce, then the government does not necessarily have the moral right to take it). Similarly, reading Spinoza as a writer with a context-dependent sensitivity to the risk of religious violence helps to illumine his determination to undermine the veracity of miracles, a determination that may seem equally out of place in today’s more secular environment (if people understand that miracles do not occur, then populists who purport to work wonders will be less likely to succeed in rousing them to violence).

To be sure, the essay’s general thesis does not apply in equal measure to all of the “canonical” early modern political theorists (the thesis would likely be less profitable as applied to, for instance, Rousseau or Adam Smith). This points to a useful qualification. The argument is not, by any means, that the limited-access/open-access distinction is equally relevant in interpreting all of the early modern political theorists. It is only that some of the normative prescriptions that political writers of the early modern period advanced become more intelligible when one considers that they originated in a harsher context.

Another useful qualification concerns the essay’s position about the relevance to contemporary Western political theory of problems such as large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression. The argument is not, under any circumstances, that such problems are irrelevant to political theory in the contemporary West. In fact, several more recent writers, such as Hayek (e.g., 1944) and Sen (e.g., 2009), have enriched the latter precisely because they have remained sensitive to the constraints that these problems impose. The argument is only that, owing to the contemporary West’s relatively high level of political-economic development, most contemporary Western political theorists find these problems less pressing than did writers such as Hobbes, Hume, and Madison.

The Limited-Access/Open-Access Distinction

Every viable state beyond a modest threshold of social complexity must manage the problem of dispersed large-scale internal violence. North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009) distinguish between two types of states—“limited” and “open” access—depending on how they manage this problem.

Limited-access states preserve order by assembling agents with violence potential into a ruling coalition and then limiting state benefits (e.g., grants of authority, monopolies, protective tariffs, seats in university classes) to coalition members. By limiting state benefits to agents with violence potential, limited-access states incentivize the latter to cooperate with the state instead of fighting, thereby keeping the peace. More precisely, limited-access states preserve order by: (1) distributing state benefits to agents with violence potential to incentivize them to cooperate with the state; (2) limiting participation in state-recognized organizations (e.g., businesses, courts, political parties, unions) to these agents to preserve the value of their investment in the state; and (3) encouraging these agents to form personal or institution-unmediated ties with each other to lower the probability of in-fighting. Characteristics (1)–(3) imply that limited-access states create monopolies, limit public access to courts and to other avenues of arbitration, and severely restrict political and economic competition. Therefore, these states fail to create robust, integrated markets, and they fail to sustain political reforms that support liberal democracy. The features of a limited-access state that enable it to function also prevent it from developing.

Open-access states, by contrast, exhibit high levels of economic specialization and market integration, which disincentivize violence. Thus, these states are able to preserve order without resort to any of characteristics (1)–(3). In the more advanced cases, open-access states allow nearly all citizens meeting reasonable and non-discriminatory eligibility criteria to enjoy state benefits, thereby fostering political and economic competition and allowing for liberal democracy and for robust markets. Today’s most advanced open-access states—such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are characterized by features such as centralization of violence potential in a professional military under civilian control, impersonal organizations to which all or almost all eligible citizens have access, and rule of law for all or almost all citizens.

For purposes of this essay, it may be helpful to highlight at least three aspects of the limited-access/open-access distinction. First, limited-access states tend to exhibit far more violence—understood, again, as personal or physical violence—than do their open-access counterparts. For example, Cox, North, and Weingast (2019, 5) have reported that, over the last 180 years, the poorest half of the world’s countries have endured a violent change in leadership, on average, once every 7 years. People who live in such countries cannot take social order for granted, and they are thus likely to have lower aspiration levels—lower “standards”—as to what constitutes a satisfactory polity. Living in tyranny is much worse than living in rule of law, but it is better than living in wholesale disorder, as many of the millions of refugees from Syria after the start of its civil war in 2011 would attest.

Second, limited-access states cannot reliably sustain political reforms that support liberal democracy, such as division of power, property rights, material equality, and rule of law. In a limited-access state, enacting such reforms tends to hinder the state’s ability to channel benefits to agents with violence potential. To take a simple example, suppose that a limited-access leader wants to supply unemployment insurance to needy citizens. Doing this would require at least initially reducing rents to agents with violence potential (or at least causing these agents to believe that the leader is likely to reduce their rents), which would risk dissolving the coalition and thus inviting violence. In a manner of speaking, limited-access states are trapped in a bad equilibrium: the need to pay for buy-in prevents them from producing political reforms that would stimulate economic growth and thus eventually obviate the need to purchase buy-in.

Third, limited-access states are not simply inchoate or incomplete versions of open-access states. Arguably, members of the international donor/development community sometimes proceed with the belief that, if foreign funders manage to supply developing countries with certain missing institutions, then they can effectuate transition from limited to open access. This approach is less than reliable. For example, trying to install anti-monopoly rules in a limited-access state risks violence by agents who have been awarded monopolies on certain industries. More generally, limited-access states are not simply open-access states with certain institutions missing. The two types of states represent qualitatively different solutions to the problem of violence.

To distinguish between limited- and open-access states is not to argue or imply that the latter satisfy any particular moral ideal or do not exhibit substantial levels of suffering, unfairness, or violence (consider, for instance, living conditions in many or most contemporary US prisons). To my mind, at least, if any normative-moral argument is embedded in the limited-access/open-access distinction as such, then the argument is comparative: because open-access states are less violent and more likely to do things such as sustain rule of law for citizens, they are more morally attractive—better—than are their limited-access counterparts. To avoid undue triumphalism about the open-access model, it is useful to keep in mind that “better” need not—and typically does not—mean “ideal.” Nor does the limited-access/open-access distinction discount the insight, often associated with Marxist analyses, that economic change has sometimes co-occurred with or even required violence, as when fledgling landowners used force to suppress enclosure riots in early modern England. The point of the limited-access/open-access distinction in this regard is only that the transition from limited to open access corresponds to a substantial increase in physical security, legal equality, and overall quality of life for the majority of those who populate the relevant country. This point can cohere with Marxist analyses in more than one way. For example, it can comport with the proposition that the state benefits that open-access orders succeed in distributing more widely were at an earlier point in time accumulated partly by dispossessing others. Put differently, the limited-access/open-access framework can concur that what it regards as political-economic development can be and sometimes is bound up with violence, in several senses of that phrase. ⁷

Today, many or most of the world’s countries remain closer to the limited-access model. Moreover, until at least the nineteenth century, open access at the level of a large-scale state did not exist. A corollary of this point is that early modern political theorists such as Hobbes, Hume, and Madison lived in environments that were closer to the limited-access model.

Before proceeding, it may be helpful to emphasize that the generality of North’s, Wallis’s, and Weingast’s limited-access/open-access distinction is intentional. The distinction’s generality allows it, at the cost of some ahistoricity, to illumine a wide range of political dynamics in contemporary countries around the world (see, e.g., Fjelde 2009, 200 (“[O]il wealth provides the economic base for a personal rule where elites attract political loyalty through the use of private economic inducements.”); Khan 2018, 636 (“The distribution of organizational power can . . . determine the institutions and policies that are likely to persist as well as the ones most likely to be developmental in that context.”); de Waal 2009, 102 (“In the patrimonial political marketplace, the only semi-stable outcome is an inclusive buy-in of all elites by the best-resourced actor in the marketplace.”)). The distinction’s generality also has the benefit of rendering it applicable to figures as heterogenous as Hobbes, Hume, and Madison: conceiving of each of the three as a limited-access writer helps to emphasize that none of them could take for granted the institutional correlates of open access.

Hobbes, Hume, and Madison

Hobbes

Hobbes in Part II of the Leviathan argued against division of power and in favor of absolutism, preferably absolute monarchy. Hobbes’s interpreters sometimes disagree about how Hobbesian absolutism would look in practice, with some, such as Holman (2021, 305), arguing that “Hobbes’s opposition to democracy . . . structure[s] various key elements of his political philosophy,” and others, such as Ryan (1996, 232), contending that “Hobbes’s ideal sovereign would be absolute in principle . . . but indistinguishable from a constitutional sovereign in practice.” Despite this disagreement, Hobbes’s interpreters (e.g., Sommerville 2016, 378) agree that he intended the Leviathan as, among other things, a defense of absolutism.

As several readers (e.g., Curran 2019, 213–14; Hoekstra 2013, 1090–92) have observed, Hobbes argued for absolutism on a combination of conceptual and empirical grounds. More specifically, he sometimes blended the conceptual claim that division of power was incoherent with the empirical claim that division of power was impossible to achieve without causing large-scale violence. This blending—which can obscure his attention to psychological and to sociological mechanisms—may partly explain why some interpreters have believed, incorrectly, that he “had virtually nothing to say” “about political [or] judicial processes” (Plamenatz 2012, 85). Hobbes’s (e.g., 1994 [1651], II.26–28) advocacy of several components of what we now call “rule of law” suffices to contest the proposition that he was almost silent about courts and politics.

Although Hobbes’s conceptual argument against division of power is historically-politically important (see, e.g., Bartelson 2011), it is the empirical argument that is relevant here. Hobbes repeated this argument using similar but non-identical language: “two sovereigns over the same people . . . cannot consist with their peace” (1994 [1651], II.22); “powers divided mutually destroy each other” (id. at II.29); and “to erect two sovereigns . . . must needs divide that power, which (if men will live in peace) is indivisible; and thereby reduce the multitude into the condition of war” (id. at II.19). On at least one occasion, moreover, he put the argument in mentalistic terms, stating that the mere belief that power could be divided had been sufficient to cause the English Civil War:

If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that [the powers of the sovereign] were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war (id. at II.18).

Several contemporary readers interpret Hobbes’s empirical argument against division of power as institutionally naive, criticizing him for failing to recognize that division of power could co-exist with durable peace.

[I]f we understand the importance of institutional arrangements both in creating and in limiting concentrations of power, then . . . Hobbes’s simple alternatives—the anarchy of the state of nature and the tyranny of the absolute sovereign—fade into ideal limits (Gauthier 1969, 169–70).

Twentieth-century readers . . . are even more opposed to instituting any of Hobbes’s ideas than his contemporaries. What these attitudes indicate is that Hobbes’s argument . . . fails to justify its conclusion . . . (Hampton 1986, 189).

[The United States government] has historically proven to be stable. But there is no absolute sovereign . . . here . . . . [W]e should reject Hobbes’s extreme views about the concentration of political power (Kavka 1986, 167–68).

Hobbes detested democracy and what he considered its swollen conception of political liberty . . . (Tarlton 2002, 83).

Hobbes commits the same error on the issue of liberty versus security as all other thinkers who are committed to monocausal explanations of complex problems and who see their solution in absolute and simplistic ways. As a result, he is unwilling to concede the common-sense point that neither absolute security nor absolute liberty can create a tolerable society . . . (George 2010, 88).

Embedded in these interpretations is a tendency to discount the political-economic constraints under which Hobbes wrote. ⁸ These readings thus risk missing an important dimension of his motivation in arguing against division of power. In today’s open-access states, we know that division of power can co-exist with durable peace. We also know, more particularly, that the U.S. division of power system has been stable for most of the last 230 years. Hobbes’s environment, however, was closer to the limited-access model. Limited-access states typically lack the background conditions—especially economic specialization and market integration—that disincentivize violence in open-access states, so they face pressure to resort to rent-creation and to limits on political and economic competition. Dividing power increases the probability of political competition.

Moreover, Hobbes lived before the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) and the subsequent Bill of Rights 1689 and Act of Settlement 1701. The last two statutes in effect instituted a stable division of power system that—especially by prohibiting the Crown from overriding Parliament’s laws, unilaterally levying taxes, and dismissing judges—formally limited the Crown’s power, and clearly established Parliament’s supremacy, for the first time. The political settlement that prevailed after the Glorious Revolution disconfirmed Hobbes’s thesis that states could not safely divide power. Yet, he did not live to see this, and the attempts at power-sharing that he did see were failures. For example, in 1642, in its “Nineteen Propositions” to Charles I, Parliament proposed certain aspects of the division of power system that the Glorious Revolution would produce 45 years later. Charles rejected Parliament’s proposal, and the English Civil War began a few months later. Similarly, 14 years earlier, in 1628, Parliament in its “Petition of Right” asked Charles to recognize the principle of no taxation without parliamentary approval—a principle that would be a central component of the Parliament-Crown relationship after 1689. Although Charles initially expressed signs of assent, in 1629, he changed course, dissolved Parliament, and proceeded to rule alone until 1640.

The contemporary tendency, then, is to underestimate the possibility that Hobbes opposed division of power not because he had authoritarian preferences but because he believed that division of power could not be sustained. The danger of dividing power in environments in which people lack sufficient incentive to refrain from violence is a general theme in discussions of the enormous difficulty of contemporary peace- or state-building projects (e.g., Gates et al. 2016; Talentino 2009, 380–83). With this in mind, closer to the mark is Hoekstra’s (2013, 1094) argument that Hobbes worried that a division of power system had no “unambiguous decision procedure” for resolving conflicts between the relevant departments.

I do not want to overstate the preceding argument about contemporary readings of Hobbes’s view of division of power. Some contemporary interpreters are far from criticizing Hobbes for too quickly discarding the idea of divided government. For example, some recent readers (e.g., Hallenbrook 2016, 183–85; Stauffer 2018, 252) have emphasized that Hobbes’s advocacy of absolutism was instrumental as opposed to intrinsic, and others (e.g., Dyzenhaus 2012, 189; Malcolm 2016, 124) have detailed that the type of absolutism that he advocated was constrained by non-trivial rule-of-law limits. Still, the contemporary tendency to criticize Hobbes for his empirical argument against division of power is robust, and this essay proposes that one reason why it is so is that most contemporary interpreters of Hobbes are far removed from the conditions of the limited-access state. The present position thus parallels Baumgold’s view that:

[U]nless [Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes] were blind state worshippers, which they were not, they must have had empirical, political grounds for preferring absolutism to accountable and divided government. [Their] theories come alive when we regard them as describing and analyzing politics in a political world very different from our own (2010, 175).

Hume

Hume in Book III of the Treatise of Human Nature defined justice primarily in terms of property rights, although he sometimes expanded his definition to include promissory obligations as well.^9,10 Hume’s account of justice is complex, but, for purposes of this essay, it can be schematized as follows. Descriptively speaking, justice is a set of conventions about the ownership and transfer of property (and perhaps about promissory obligations as well). The property conventions that constitute justice emerged spontaneously and gradually, and they did so because they enabled individuals who were not naturally inclined to empathize with each other to collaborate, to obtain mutual gains from cooperation and exchange, and to avoid costly fights that are likely to arise when people lack common knowledge about who owns what goods. At some point after these property conventions became established, people perceived that abiding by them was welfare-enhancing. Perceiving this caused people to begin to attribute moral blame to those who violated the conventions, thereby transforming the conventions into moral rules. Prescriptively speaking—Hume’s account continues—it is desirable for one or another set of property conventions to obtain in a society, because such conventions prevent violent conflict over property and thereby enhance the welfare of all or almost all. However, it is self-defeating to devote too much attention to the question of which set of property conventions should control, because such attention invites conflict.

Note three features of Hume’s account. First, it defines justice primarily in terms of property rights. By contemporary Western standards, this is a perversely thin definition. Second, it seems to conceive of property as private as opposed to common or communal. Third, it does not specify a criterion for choosing between two or more different sets of property conventions, provided that each of them is sufficient to preserve peace and to facilitate cooperation and exchange. From Hume’s perspective, if a set of property conventions accomplishes these goals, it meets the operative aspiration level.

Many contemporary readers interpret Hume’s account of justice as revealing a politically regressive bias, criticizing him for declining to build desiderata such as equality and fairness into his account.

Hume sees justice as almost exclusively concerned with the establishment and maintenance of property rights. . . . There is no mention of justice as a set of procedures for guaranteeing fairness or equity in the distribution of goods or opportunities. Questions about why this person, and not that person, should be in a particular position in society seem not to have occurred to him at all (Stroud 1977, 202–03 (internal citations omitted)).

Justice . . . has something to do with . . . equity and impartiality, but Hume makes scarcely any mention of these . . . . Hume puts an entirely excessive emphasis upon property . . . when talking about justice (Harrison 1981, 28–42).

[I]nstitutions that reflect relations of power may be criticized as failing to measure up to the criteria of justice . . . . That Hume did not acknowledge and investigate . . . this possibility simply shows that at this point in the development of his theory he proved to be a better conservative than he was a philosopher (Barry 1989, 164).

Hume’s conservative scepticism consists in what his theory of justice distinctly lacks, viz. a notion of “fairness” or “impartiality” . . . . This Hume refuses to supply (Snare 1991, 245 (emphasis in original)).

[Hume’s] overall argument is that human beings are much better off having some property conventions rather than none. [H]aving some such conventions in place is so important that the marginal expected utility of moving from one set of property conventions to another is almost never great enough to risk undermining the stability of the existing conventions. This last contention is notoriously conservative . . . (Ridge 2010, 153).

These interpretations reflect a tendency to discount the political-economic constraints under which Hume wrote. They thus risk missing an important part of his motivation in offering his account of justice. In today’s open-access states, we know that thick accounts of justice—accounts that emphasizes desiderata such as equality and fairness—can be translated into policy using, especially, progressive taxation. Thus, in open-access states, it is both policy-relevant and desirable to debate a range of interventions for accomplishing goals such as reducing material inequality and off-setting the cost to a low-income person of living with a chronic disease. ¹¹

Hume’s environment, however, was closer to the limited-access model. In a limited-access state, the ability to implement a thick definition of justice is not clear. One reason for this has to do with the pressure that limited-access states face to ensure buy-in. Because these states often must enrich agents with violence potential to secure their cooperation, they are often hard-pressed to direct state benefits such as disability payments, food vouchers, and unemployment insurance to needy citizens. Implementing a thick definition of justice requires the ability to distribute material resources on an impersonal basis. Moreover, as Hardin (e.g., 1999, 406; 2005, 186) observed, Hume lived before governments had the administrative and epistemic capacities—the bureaucracy and the information—reliably to collect and manipulate income taxes (see, e.g., Kreager 2015). In the absence of an income tax, the feasibility of large-scale redistribution is questionable. Consider here Hardin’s (2005, 186; see also King 2000, 5) observation that, throughout Hume’s life, any redistribution that existed in Britain was, as in the Elizabethan poor law system, highly decentralized by necessity. The difficulty of detecting tax evasion in rich countries today (see, e.g., Alstadsæter et al. 2019) suggests that, even in polities with much greater state capacity, administering tax and transfer is not a trivial task.

The contemporary tendency, then, is to underestimate the possibility that Hume declined to provide a thick account of justice not because he had politically regressive preferences but because he believed that such an account could not be translated into policy. At least three arguments in the Treatise suggest that he believed this. First, Hume argued that the primary function of ideas about justice was simply to obviate violent conflict over property:

[T]he convention for the distinction of property, and for the stability of possession, is . . . the most necessary to the establishment of human society, and . . . after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord (1896 [1739–40] 3.2.2 (emphasis added)).

For Hume, once the idea of justice has succeeded in precluding the threat of violence, it has served its primary function.

Second, Hume argued that, in resolving property disputes, adjudicators should hold to established legal rules even in cases where doing so seems inequitable or unfair. For Hume, departing from established rules to “do justice in the circumstances” risks conflict:

‘Tis . . . absolutely necessary to society, that possession shou’d be stable . . . . But we find, that were we to follow the same advantage, in assigning particular possessions to particular persons, we shou’d disappoint our end, and perpetuate the confusion, which that rule is intended to prevent (id. at 3.2.10).

Here is a more revealing statement of the same idea:

‘Twere better, no doubt, that every one were possess’d of what is most suitable to him, and proper for his use: But besides, that this relation of fitness may be common to several at once, ’tis liable to so many controversies, and men are so partial and passionate in judging of these controversies, that such a loose and uncertain rule wou’d be absolutely incompatible with the peace of human society (id. at 3.2.3).

Hume’s claim here is that, although distribution in accordance with a thick desert criterion is more desirable from a normative moral perspective, it is not feasible. It is possible that Hume was not confident that the legal system with which he was familiar could handle a policy of routinely allowing judges to resolve disputes using case-specific criteria. At any rate, in accord with this hypothesis, several interpreters (e.g., Lindsay 2021, 46; Rizzo 2021, 33) have emphasized Hume’s insistence on holding to established rules.

Third, Hume argued that the rules that adjudicators use to resolve property disputes should be general ¹² and simple, and that relatively complex distribution criteria—contemporary examples of which are prioritarianism and Rawlsianism—are too particular and too contestable for large numbers of people to be able to coordinate around them:

Property must be stable, and must be fix’d by general rules (1896 [1739–40], 3.2.2).

[I]f men were to regulate their conduct . . . by the view of a peculiar interest, either public or private, they wou’d involve themselves in endless confusion . . . . The private interest of every one is different; and tho’ the public interest in itself be always one and the same, yet it becomes the source of as great dissentions, by reason of the different opinions of particular persons concerning it. . . . We must, therefore, proceed by general rules . . . in modifying the law of nature concerning the stability of possession (id. at 3.2.10).

Statements such as these suggest that Hume refrained from defining justice in terms of any thick principle of distribution because he was concerned that the need to settle on one such principle to the exclusion of others would risk the very conflict that he believed it was the purpose of justice to prevent. Relevant here is the way in which Hume (e.g., id. at 3.2.3) foreshadowed Schelling-style (e.g., 1960, 54–58) arguments about the ability of salience to help people coordinate their behavior to the benefit of all (see, e.g., Lindsay 2021, 47). One may plausibly state that, from Hume’s perspective, thick principles of distribution lacked sufficient salience.

I do not want to overstate the preceding argument about contemporary readings of Hume’s account of justice. Some contemporary interpreters (e.g., Brett 1987, 68–70; Harris 2019; Lindsay 2021, 64–69) are far from criticizing Hume for defining justice in a perversely thin way. For example, Postema (2006, 374) has suggested that Hume’s property-centric account of justice can be partly explained by the fact that he studied English property law as a teenager. Still, the contemporary tendency to attribute the narrowness of Hume’s account of justice to politically regressive bias is robust. Relatedly, even interpreters who sympathize with Hume (e.g., Cruise 2020) sometimes defend his account on the ground that it is not as thin as it seems.

Madison

At and around the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison advocated a series of limits on majority rule for the new national government of the United States. These counter-majoritarian constitutional provisions included, among others, large electoral districts for the House of Representatives, a non-popularly elected Senate that would serve to check the House, election of judges by the Senate, an executive-judicial council of revision that would serve to check the legislature, and a broad federal veto over state laws.

Many contemporary readers interpret Madison’s advocacy of counter-majoritarian provisions as evidence of anti-democratic preference.

Madison wished to erect a political system that would guarantee the liberties of certain minorities whose advantages of status, power, and wealth would, he thought, probably not be tolerated indefinitely by a constitutionally untrammeled majority (Dahl 1956, 31).

[C]onstitutionalism . . . in its Madisonian version . . . is designed to strew as many barriers as possible to demotic power (Wolin 1994, 22).

[Madison] valued the stability of society and the security of property rights on a plane above . . . the rights of individuals to exercise their . . . powers and capacities (Matthews 1995, xvi).

The concern of James Madison and other framers of the U.S. Constitution was to avoid democracy and, in particular, to guard against “government by the people” or government guided by the popular will (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000, 299).

Madison’s principal reason for deifying the Founders was his belief that the people could not be trusted to intelligently rule themselves (Klarman 2016, 4).

Implicit in these interpretations is a tendency to discount the political-economic constraints under which Madison wrote, and thus to miss an important part of his motivation in advocating counter-majoritarian constitutional provisions. Today, we know that it is possible to sustain a far more majoritarian political system than the one that Madison promoted at the Convention. Madison, however, could not have known this. As Gardner (2018, 512 (internal citations omitted)) has noted about the federal aspect of Madison’s plan for the new government, “a federation structured in [the way that Madison envisioned around 1787] had never previously existed, and Madison’s account was based more on deduction from plausible first premises than on observation or experience.” In 1787, no one knew whether a large-scale democracy—even one suffused with possibly redundant limits on majority rule—could endure. Moreover, Madison was not acquainted with what we now understand as a democratic franchise. According to one researcher’s (Bateman 2018, 47) estimate, in colonial America, no more than 10% of the total non-indigenous population could vote, and, for most of the eighteenth century, “the legislative trend . . . was toward restricting the electorate” (id. at 48). Another researcher (Dickinson 1994, 32) reported that, in late-eighteenth-century England and Wales, only about 20% of men could vote. Nor did Madison have models of successful large-scale democracies on which to draw. Constitution-making in the United States in 1787 differed from, for instance, constitution-making in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 90s. Writing around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Elster (1991, 468) noted that “[t]he Eastern Europeans have a rich and diverse menu from which to choose when they draft the constitutional provisions dealing with the machinery of government.” The same was not true for the Americans of 1787. In addition to being unsure whether a large-scale democracy could be sustained, Madison was unsure about the more basic question of whether the United States would remain united. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation were disintegrating, recent efforts to reform the Articles had not succeeded, and Madison had no reason to assume that, if the new Constitution failed, the nation would avoid splintering into blocs. As Riker (1982, 12) observed, “[m]ost people in 1787 seemed to think that the alternative to the Constitution was several regional federations,” as in Latin America in the early part of the nineteenth century. Even today, many democratic constitutions fail within a generation. ¹³

Madison around 1787 expressed at least three concerns that suggest that he had doubts about the sustainability of majority rule. Because these concerns are—to US readers, at least—well known, I itemize them particularly quickly. First, Madison, influenced partly by his view that the classical republics had been precarious, was sensitive to the possibility that demagogues would tempt voters to subvert their own political rights:

[T]here are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn (Federalist No. 63).

Second, influenced partly by his uneasy experience as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, he worried that property-less majorities of citizens would repeatedly lobby legislatures to expropriate propertied minorities. One of his most telling statements of this concern is in a 1786 letter to James Monroe:

There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied . . . than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonomous with “Ultimate happiness” . . . the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in the popular sense, as referring to immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false. In the latter sense it would be the interest of the majority in every community to despoil & enslave the minority of individuals; and in a federal community to make a similar sacrifice of the minority of the component States.

This concern, too, is related to Madison’s location in a setting in which institutional designers could not take for granted a rule of law-providing and property rights-enforcing state. For example, Madison could not assume that judicial review, which was still in its infancy in the 1780s, could preclude confiscatory legislation. ¹⁴ Similarly, partly because he was not acquainted with the body of property rights protections that contemporary U.S. constitutional law enforces, he was ambivalent about the ability of a written bill of rights to protect property (see, e.g., Rakove 1992). Third, Madison worried that—by producing myopic, inconsistent, duplicative, and badly-written legislation—majority rule might discredit the republican ideal that the new nation was supposed to instantiate. Because Madison lived before experience had shown people around the world that democracies could perform (as well as out-perform non-democratic rivals ¹⁵ ), he was sensitive to the possibility that, by producing a profusion of low-grade legislation, the new country might embarrass the republican principle.

Madison made explicit his view that counter-majoritarian constitutional provisions were necessary to stabilize the new Constitution:

Mr. Madison, was not apprehensive of being thought to favor any step towards monarchy. The real object with him was to prevent its introduction. . . . If no effectual check be devised for restraining the instability & encroachments of [the state legislatures], a revolution of some kind or other would be inevitable. The preservation of Republican Govt. therefore required some expedient for the purpose, but required evidently at the same time that in devising it, the genuine principles of that form should be kept in view (in Farrand 1911, 35).

From an open-access perspective, statements such as these are liable to seem disingenuous. From a limited-access perspective, however, Madison’s advocacy of constitutional limits on majority rule seems grounded partly in a credible concern about sustainability. In this regard, the present argument accords with Kramer’s (2020, 331; see also Ketcham 1987, 579) view that “Madison’s whole purpose was to make democratic politics work, not to minimize the extent to which it interfered with a ruling elite.” Moreover, it may be worthwhile to be cautious before concluding that Madison’s position lacks any normative-moral cache. If initially imposing limits on majority rule stabilizes a constitution that later produces larger and more widely distributed gains in welfare and in justice than would have obtained otherwise, then the initial limit may be morally commendable.

Conclusion

This essay has applied existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay has proposed that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter’s normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today’s West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers’ objectives.

* * *

Consider, as an addendum, perhaps the best-known contemporary normative account of justice in Western political theory: Rawls’s (e.g., 1999 [1971]). Rawls (e.g., id. at 7–8, 215) acknowledged that his account of justice was limited in its application to what are in effect developed countries. ¹⁶ Moreover, one can infer his focus on the developed world from the content of certain parts of his account. For example, in formulating the first of his two main “principles of justice,” he postulated that various “basic liberties” were already in place and prepared for distribution—that they were “given by a list”:

[T]he basic liberties are given by a list of such liberties. Important among these are political liberty (the right to vote and to hold public office) and freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person, which includes freedom from psychological oppression and physical assault and dismemberment (integrity of the person); the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are to be equal by the first principle [of Rawls’s account of justice] (1999 [1971], 53).

In the early modern period, like in many countries around the world today, these liberties could not be reliably distributed for the simple reason that they did not reliably exist. Among the ambitions of many of the early modern European political theorists was better to understand how to design polities that could create and sustain such rights.