Because of recent reading of Rene Brouwer's (2022) Law and Philosophy in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge) and Jed Atkins’ (2013) Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge), I picked up Polybius’ Histories. I realized I had only been familiar with excerpts from Book 6, but now I am wholly immersed in it. Before long I want to connect it to Federalist Papers 18, and its treatment of Achaean federalism (and see below for a hint). But today, I want to focus on Hume.
Now, the contemporary Polybius’ reception is dominated by a single idea: the separation (and tricky) balancing of powers of a constitution or regime. This is, for example, the only use for Polybius in the entry “Ancient political philosophy,” in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy. (Yes, I am aware that among Machiavelli scholars there is a wider discussion of Polybius’ influence, but even there most of the focus seems to be on Book 6.) David Hume also evokes Polybius on this point (see below), but especially in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Hume also draws other lessons and insights from Polybius and uses him as a source in his own work (not the least in his work on population, which links his views on demography and political economy).
One of the minor oddities in scholarship on David Hume is a general lack of interest in Hume’s relationship to Polybius. This despite the fact that he mentions him quite frequently and in early 1747, he wrote his about-to-be-famous cousin, Henry Home, about his fondness for “my Polybius.” (Letter 54 and p. 100 in Greig’s edition, vol. 1. This is coupled with a fondness for Xenophon, too.) In fact, in an otherwise critical passage, in the second Enquiry, Hume calls Polybius, “one of the gravest and most judicious, as well as most moral writers of antiquity.” (5.6) This relative neglect is presumably due to the fact that we don’t turn to Hume for insight on the separation of powers (in the British constitution). I return to this below.
In what follows, I leave aside the instances where Hume uses Polybius as a source of evidence. Although it is worth noting most of these derive from the first three books of Histories. Rather, I focus on some juicier stuff.
First, as I have repeatedly noted this past year (in my general effort to suggest that Hume is far less liberal than is often allowed), Hume has considerable fondness for balance of power thinking in international relations. In fact, in the essay that deals with it, “Of the Balance of Power,” relies on Polybius not only as a source on the role (and its absence) of the balance of power in Hellenistic times in Hume’s own analysis of it, but Hume also relies on Polybius as an expositor on the normative/action-guiding-role of the balance of power:
The only prince we meet with in the Roman history, who seems to have understood the balance of power, is Hiero king of Syracuse. Though the ally of Rome, he sent assistance to the Carthaginians, during the war of the auxiliaries; “Esteeming it requisite,” says Polybius, “both in order to retain his dominions in Sicily, and to preserve the Roman friendship, that Carthage should be safe; lest by its fall the remaining power should be able, without contrast or opposition, to execute every purpose and undertaking. And here he acted with great wisdom and prudence. For that is never, on any account, to be overlooked; nor ought such a force ever to be thrown into one hand, as to incapacitate the neighbouring states from defending their rights against it.” Here is the aim of modern politics pointed out in express terms.
If you disagree with me that Hume himself endorses balance of power as action-guiding in the modern system of politics, then you may still acknowledge that Hume diagnoses here that Polybius articulates how the balance of power is action guiding (and that Polybius himself endorses it way back when and that it has become conventional wisdom in modern politics).
Second, while discussing how he treats Polybius as a source, Hume offers a more general account of his own principles reading sources where there may be political reasons for prudence. The passage I am about to quote can be found in his essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” as note [RR] attached to the following sentence, “Polybius supposes, that Greece had become more prosperous and flourishing after the establishment of the Roman yoke[258]; and though that historian wrote before these conquerors had degenerated, from being the patrons, to be the plunderers of mankind; yet as we find from Tacitus, that the severity of the emperors afterwards corrected the licence of the governors, we have no reason to think that extensive monarchy so destructive as it is often represented.” In the note, Hume then wards off a possible objection:
It may perhaps be imagined, that Polybius, being dependent on Rome, would naturally extol the Roman dominion. But, in the first place, Polybius, though one sees sometimes instances of his caution, discovers no symptoms of flattery. Secondly, This opinion is only delivered in a single stroke, by the by, while he is intent upon another subject; and it is allowed, if there be any suspicion of an author's insincerity, that these oblique propositions discover his real opinion better than his more formal and direct assertions.*
To avoid misunderstanding: notice that Hume is not defending looking for a hidden meaning between the lines (to be recovered through some cryptographic key). Rather, he is alerting us to the fact that an author may state their most sincere views as isolated even otherwise oblique asides.
Third, in “Of the Original Contract,” Hume draws on Polybius in a somewhat puzzling way. I believe the passage I am about to quote is supposed to help illustrate his claim that granted that the social contract is a source of legitimacy, we should not “imagine all others [regimes] monstrous and irregular.” After a paragraph on the limited nature of Athenian democracy, Hume then writes, “The Achæans enjoyed the freest and most perfect democracy of all antiquity; yet they employed force to oblige some cities to enter into their league, as we learn from Polybius.”
As an aside, Polybius father was an important politician in the Achaean league or federation. And Polybius describes what we may call the constitution of this league in the most exalted ways. In the Ancient world, the Achaeans comes as close to perfecting what Constant called the new federalism (which (recall) I have recently traced back to More’s Utopia). In fact, I would love to find evidence that More read Polybius because there are uncanny similarities between the federalism and foreign policy of Achaeans and Utopians. When Hume articulates his own blueprint for a new federalism, Hume himself explicitly (and critically!) mentions Utopia in “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” but not Polybius.
Now, to return to the third point, in the quoted passage from “Of the Original Contract,” I doubt that Hume’s main point here is that even the best democracies will expand by aggressive means (although he surely thinks that true). Rather, his real point seems to be that even in the best ancient democracies many inhabitants never get a chance to consent explicitly to the regime, and this does not make them illegitimate.
Fourth, lurking in Hume’s account is, I think, an implicit agreement with Polybius’ criticism of the way actual democracy functions (among the Achaeans) when there are competing factions. We can discern this in Hume’s comment that “The Rhodian and Achaean republics are much celebrated by ancient historians for their wisdom and sound policy; yet both of them assisted the Romans in their wars against Philip and Antiochus.”** This was a violation of balance of power thinking. In the case of the Achaeans this led to their conquest and downfall.
Here Hume nor his editor tells us who is source is. But it’s pretty clear that it is Polybius, who notes how factional infighting can lead to a mismatch of individual and collective interests such that one’s policy goes against the balance of power. (For his criticism of the war being a consequence of factional infighting among the Achaeans see book 38; and on their implied failure to adhere to balance of power 38.5 and, for both, book 39.) This analysis is echoed in Federalist Papers 18 (as promised about that some other time), although by then there were intermediary sources (including Mably, which Federalist 18 mentions) who discuss the case.+
Fifth, as I have been noting recently (I even drafted (see here) a paper on this), Hume defends the utility of the crown’s patronage/clientelism in “Of the Independency of Parliament.” (As I note there Adam Smith echoes this in his defense of federalism/parliamentary union.) There it is presented as a mechanism by which the Crown/the executive branch can resist the usurpation of all power by the legislative, and Hume treats it as necessary to the survival of the mixed constitution. He then adds a footnote clarifying his position and indebtedness to Polybius:
BY that influence of the crown, which I would justify, I mean only that which arises from the offices and honours that are at the disposal of the crown. As to private bribery, it may be considered in the same light as the practice of employing spies, which is scarcely justifiable in a good minister, and is infamous in a bad one: But to be a spy, or to be corrupted, is always infamous under all ministers, and is to be regarded as a shameless prostitution. Polybius justly esteems the pecuniary influence of the senate and censors to be one of the regular and constitutional weights, which preserved the balance of the Roman government.
Here Polybius isn’t just a source, he is also treated as an authority worth (“justly esteems”) emulating, and so shapes Hume’s own constitutional thinking. (More on that when I discuss federalism.)
Okay, let me wrap up. I hope today’s post was entertaining on its own merits and whets the appetite for more on some of the themes noted here. But there is also something instructive here. Too often we let an author become synonymous with a singular or leading idea. For most of us who will be quickly assigned to oblivion in our own times and thereafter, that’s already quite an achievement. And so we often study or read him/her only in light of that idea at the neglect of the rest. This is not a mystery: life is short and presence in curricula is a decidedly zero-sum affair; in addition, good ideas often have many moms and fathers, and so there is often no need to treat an author in their rich complexity. But from the point of view of scholarly score-keeping and a more truthful history of ideas our practices of intellectual economy also come at significant costs.
*One sometimes wishes Hume’s own readers would be alert to this.
**It would be especially interesting if Hume here conveys the idea that the Achaean league is itself a republic (rather than a confederation of republics). But the wording is ambiguous.
+Mably was quite familiar with Hume, and Polybius and Hume were well known among the Founders. So it would be a mistake to point to a single source.