Hume's Political Methodology: A Reconsideration of “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”

Abstract

In his analysis of Plato's Republic, Aristotle objects to his teacher's abstract and psychological method by suggesting that “there is another matter which must not be ignored—the teaching of actual experience. We are bound to pay some regard to the long past and the passage of the years, in which these things…would not have gone unnoticed if they had been really good.” Ever since that time, political theorists have been divided on the question of the appropriate approach to the study of politics, and often, as in the case of Plato and Aristotle, the focal point of the disagreement has been whether politics is best seen through the lens of history or the study of human nature and the development of a consequent psychology. This, for example, is the crux of the argument between James Mill and T. B. Macaulay. Mill is the proponent of a psychological approach; he maintains “it is immediately obvious that a wide and difficult field is presented, and that the whole science of human nature must be explored to lay a foundation for the science of government.” Macaulay disagrees, for he believes that “the style which the Utilitarians admire, suits only those subjects on which it is possible to reason a priori.” Indeed, in Macaulay's view, Mill belongs in the Middle Ages: “of those schoolmen Mr. Mill has inherited both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century, born out of due season.” Far better, continues Macaulay, is the inductive historical method which observes the world, examines facts, devotes itself to the careful study of the past, and checks itself “by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts….”