1 - Commerce as an ‘Affair of State’

Summary

After the power of alienations, as well as the encrease of commerce, had thrown the ballance of property into the hands of the commons, the situation of affairs and the dispositions of men became susceptible of a more regular plan of liberty; and the laws were not supported singly by the authority of the sovereign.

Hume, The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: containing the Reign of James I and Charles I, 1754

In Book III of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith made the striking claim that ‘commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors’.To this Smith added, ‘Mr Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.’ Hume's originality, Smith recognised, lay in his identification of commerce as the driving force of personal and political freedom in modern Europe.

Although many writers have discussed the transformative role of commerce in the historiography of the Enlightenment, Hume's political thought has usually been considered as less ground-breaking than that of his seventeenth-century counterparts. For example, John Dunn has claimed that Hume failed to develop Locke's idea of the origin of government beyond what Locke originally argued.Countering this view, Hont argued that Hume and Smith sought to supply an entirely new theory of the foundation of the state, namely ‘a dualistic theory in which both liberty and authority play a significant role’. Hont maintained that Hume and Smith had shifted the foundation of political theory from the seventeenth-century idea of Christian sociability, which denoted a God-ordained social hierarchy, to the eighteenth-century language of a commercial society, which placed a novel emphasis on the role of commerce in social relationships. In Hont's view, Hume's moral interpretation of history was crafted through a comprehensive critique of Christianity. Hume observed that the emergence of a commercial ethos served to challenge the social relationships of the ancien régime, and that the principles of politics and law ought to be re-established on the basis of the market economy.