A context for liberalism: A Humean account of political justification.

Abstract

From Rousseau and Marx to Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, communitarians have argued that liberalism fails to understand and respect the values that arise from the practices of particular communities. But liberalism need not fall prey to this objection, once we understand the role that practices should play in a political theory. In the largely-unread historical and political works of David Hume, I argue, we can find the resources for a political theory that stresses the importance of the material and social conditions of a society that shape its practices and that can answer these and other critics of liberalism. The practices of a society, Hume suggests, are the best--and perhaps the only--means by which we can judge the legitimacy of its political structure. No abstract rules for revolution or absolute values for justification can ever do the task that is required. Only by constructing an interpretation of our own practices that is sensitive to the values that can be found within them can we, as political critics, determine when a revolution is justified. And only by seeing political justification itself as a social practice will we understand the dynamics of this process and the limits of its scope. Thus, liberal practices were justified in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, I argue, because they cohered best with the practices that had developed in Britain during the seventeenth century, and it is justified in the West today precisely because, despite the polemics of the communitarians, it is still the best system given our practices and our community.