Pufendorf, Hume and Adam Smith: A Question of Influence

In 2020, he will retire from his post.

Schumpeter writes: ‘he … does not seem to me to have added much to the stock of knowledge and to the analytic apparatus of the late scholastics’. I owe this quotation to Karl Heinz Schmidt who mentions Schumpeter’s remark in his contribution to this volume.

The fourth stage is the age of commercial society.

Hume and Smith took their concept of sociability from Hutcheson. Hutcheson wrote: ‘God gave us a sense of the fitting and the beautiful; associated with this sense, as moderator of all the grosser pleasures is shame; he also gave the keen spur of praise. The effect of all these is to make life social and kindly, and to make all the duties which are honourable and beneficial to others most advantageous and at the same time most pleasant for the agent himself, and to make even the innate self-love of our nature in no way contrary to our common and benevolent affections’ (F. Hutcheson 2006, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’).

We may assume that he had the commercial society as the fourth stage in mind, when he developed his economic theory.

Expressing doubts at the same time about the practical use of such a standard.

There is consensus on the rulings of conventional wisdom, among these are the following: (1) Civil society cannot exist without the authority of the State. (2) A citizen of the State has to obey the political and social conventions. (3) Ideally, that citizen has no say in the administration and defence of the nation. (4) Civil society consists of monogamous families in which the husband is head of the family. (5 Relations between the members of civil society are determined by property and status. (6) Contracts further determine these relations. (7) Justice depends on the proper administration of laws and rulings. These laws and rulings also determine the margin of freedom individuals have for acting and expressing themselves.

Latin edition 1684, first English translation 1727.

Haakonssen (1978, p. 484); but Hume talks about the laws of nature, not about natural law.

At least in this book, Habermas seems to be innocent of Pufendorf’s existence.

I used Barbeyrac’s translation of De Jure Naturae and Michael Silverthorne’s English translation: Pufendorf 1991) On the Duty of Man and Citizen.

It is still debatable whether Hobbes meant to say that human beings are too selfish to want to reach an agreement with their fellows or that the competitive situation in which they live makes them incapable to keep the peace without the help of the State.

Montesquieu did not invent the trias politica. He distinguished two sources of authority: the legislative shared by the people and the nobility and the executive which was the prerogative of the monarch. In De la Constitution d’Angleterre, book 11, chap. 6 of De l’Esprit des Lois, he remarked that those two powers could block any decision or ‘elles seront forcées d’aller de concert’ (Montesquieu 1964, p. 589).

This was already in 1752 the wrong example. The Dutch Republic at that time was already anything but stable and its government almost collapsed on the eve of the French Revolution.

Artificial virtues are those we acquire by convention.

On utility and the agreeable.

The text of Hume’s letter is given in note 2; Smith’s answer appears in note b at the bottom of the page. Smith has a point in that you cannot reduce a moral judgement to a utilitarian calculus and the esteem of what is good is embedded in the soul, but I do not think that Hume would deny this; however, he would leave it to every individual in the course of his transactions to decide what is good and proper, while Smith appealed to a universal principle housed in all human beings.

The quotation from WN is at vol. 2, IV, ix, 51, 687–688.

To be fair, Hume referred to stockholders, not entrepreneurs, but he was undoubtedly wise enough to see the connection between the two.

Under the influence of the Idealist philosophy in nineteenth-century Germany, natural jurisprudence as a paradigm declined, but the decline was not a straightforward affair. Apart from those who stuck to the old paradigm, there were those, particularly jurists, who kept open a lifeline to natural jurisprudence. (In fact, until recently law students in the Netherlands had to take a course in Roman law during their first year.) Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1867) is an interesting case in this context. His work is difficult to grasp. (Rückert1984, 119). Known as an authority on Roman law, he published the Idealist manifest Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (1814). In it he argued that rights and laws were not the product of an abstract doctrine, but spontaneously sprung from the Volksgeist. For a conservative as Savigny, this created a dilemma. Savigny was against the democracy of one man one vote. So how could he determine the proper right and the proper law? He found his answer in Roman law which according to his own admission was linked to natural law. He did not use it in the same way as Pufendorf, because he did not believe in the practical application of natural law as Pufendorf did. As a scholar, he contemplated the quality of Roman jurisprudence and derived from his study the measure of good and bad while judging modern legislation. So Savigny like Pufendorf believed in Juristenrecht. Jurists should be the judge of jurisprudence and legislation.