Power and Trade in Hume’s Political Discourses

This article takes up “Of the Balance of Power” on Hume’s own less-than-scientific terms. It will show that Hume did not sanction universal mechanisms at the expense of historical particularities. Instead, he composed his essay as an attempt at moderating an increasingly polarized debate over Britain’s foreign strategy. Hume published “Of the Balance of Power” just after Britain’s expensive involvement in the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), and he continued to reprint the essay during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the great commercial conflict that spanned two continents and that confirmed the European powers’ failure to achieve a peaceful balance among themselves.

“Of the Balance of Power” initially appeared in the Political Discourses (1752), the collection Hume wrote in the wake of the War of Austrian Succession, shortly after returning home from his post as secretary to an embassy in the courts of Turin and Vienna. The Discourses are the product of this decade-long conflict (Ahn Reference Ahn, Onnekink and Rommelse2011; Robertson Reference Robertson, Phillipson and Skinner1993; Rothschild Reference Rothschild, Bailyn and Denault2009), and “Of the Balance of Power” shows Hume intervening to challenge the dynamics he associated with Europe’s costly wars. Hume, Reference Hume and MillerI will argue, mounted his intervention by asking readers to take a longer view of the connections between war and trade; this meant reconsidering how state-balancing had historically succeeded or failed. After a brief overview of controversies pertaining to the balance of power as a modern concept, this article attends to several key predecessors who informed Hume’s investigation of balancing in the ancient world—namely, Niccolò Machiavelli, Andrew Fletcher, and Montesquieu. As we shall see, Hume’s Political Discourses display a sustained engagement with Fletcher’s An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind ([1703] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997b), as well as Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decline ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000). Fletcher and Montesquieu were each astute readers of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, the classic text for assessing ancient statecraft through modern eyes.

Hume compiled his Political Discourses during an era when appeals to the balance of power had become a matter of course for King George II and his Whig ministers (Black Reference Black2004, 196; Simms Reference Simms, Scott and Simms2007). At the start of the War of Austrian Succession, George II increased British armaments in the name of protecting “the balance of power, and the liberties of Europe” ([1740] Reference Cobbett1812, col. 611). But not all Britons were convinced that the balance of power amounted to a coherent concept. Many Tories and opposition Whigs perceived talk of balancing as a rhetorical cover for committing British troops on the continent (Ahn Reference Ahn, Onnekink and Rommelse2011; Anderson Reference Anderson, Hatton and Anderson1970, 197; Harris Reference Harris1993, 93–4). In 1752, the same year that Hume issued his essay, William Beckford accused his Whig opponents of pursuing personal agendas “under the mask of that public interest, called the balance of power” ([1752] Reference Beckford and Cobbett1813, col. 1161). Lord Bolingbroke, a leading voice for the Tory press, complained that the Whig obsession with upholding the “Balance of Power in Europe,” had become “like an Ignis Fatuus,” blindly leading Britain “from danger to danger” (Reference Bolingbroke1748, 47).Footnote ³ Thus, when Hume’s essay enquired whether the balance of power was closer to an “idea” or modern “phrase,” the question was very much a live one ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 332). In 1744, the Earl of Chesterfield, an opposition Whig and acquaintance to Hume, labeled the balance of power “an Ideal Chimera, introduc’d among us by corrupt and designing Ministers” (Reference Chesterfield1744, 33). The Earl of Halifax protested that the balance of power was “a wonder-working word,” with its meaning dictated by “thieves of state,” who stood to profit from English military involvement on the continent (Reference Chesterfield1744, col. 587). It was against this backdrop that Hume asked whether the basic principle of the balance of power might predate the political vocabulary of “these later ages” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 332). Hume’s survey of the balance of power and its history grappled with the issue of whether the balance of power counted as a concept at all and, if so, whether it was a concept worth defending. The answer had a direct bearing on British foreign policy.

Political scientists still dispute whether the balance of power is an axiom of international affairs or simply a rhetorical device (Haas Reference Haas1953; Little Reference Little2007; Nexon Reference Nexon2009; Vasquez and Elman Reference Vasquez and Colmin2003). IR scholars searching for the prehistory of balance-of-power research have understandably turned to Hume as a source, but many researchers have too quickly projected their preferred metatheories (or their protests against metatheories) onto Hume. This tendency is unfortunate because Hume’s political essays tell a different story about the balance of power—one that IR specialists interested in alternatives to the neorealist paradigm should find attractive. First of all, Hume’s genealogy of the balance of power emphasized history and narrative over structural abstractions. Furthermore, he refused to treat politics and economics as separate spheres. Bringing together both strands of Hume’s argument will demonstrate that Hume did not apply the balance of power as an automatic law; he invoked it as a normative plea in a Europe embroiled in commercial war, national debt, and an ideology of “universal monarchy” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 635).

While balance-of-power reasoning sparked skepticism from members of the opposition, mainstream Whigs defended Britain’s involvement in Europe in increasingly scientific terms, as a matter of “systems” and “natural” allies (Simms Reference Simms, Scott and Simms2007, 131). Jeremy Black summarizes the Whig outlook as a “mechanistic viewpoint in thrall to Newtonian physics, with clear-cut national interests that could be readily assessed and balanced” (Reference Black2004, 196). Hume never presented the balance of power so mechanistically, but neither did he think the concept could be easily jettisoned.Footnote ⁴ He instead worked to supply historical content for a political practice that was fast degenerating into a vague partisan trope. Perhaps the balance of power, as a historical practice, could be separated from mere rhetoric.

What follows will trace how Fletcher and Montesquieu, with Machiavelli in the background, guided Hume’s enquiry into what was different—and eerily similar—about ancient and modern conceptions of the balance of power. Fletcher’s Conversation and Montesquieu’s Considerations each approached modern Europe via a comparison with the ancients and asked how modern Britain might avoid the perils of an overextended empire. Daniel Nexon notes that IR still “lack[s] much in the way of critical genealogies of the balance of power” (Reference Nexon2009, 356). Although by no means comprehensive, the descent from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy to Hume’s Political Discourses offers one such genealogy.

Robert Cox reminds us that realist IR began as a historical mode of thought, dating back to “Machiavelli and the diplomacy of the Renaissance Italian city-states.” Only after World War II did realism transform into a “fixed ahistorical view” (Reference Cox1981, 131). The present study claims that Hume’s Political Discourses have more in common with the critical-historical mode Cox attributes to the late Renaissance than the rationalism of postwar realism. Yet even international critical theorists, otherwise suspicious of IR’s master narratives, have largely overlooked Hume as a historical resource.Footnote ⁵ When Hume does appear in this postpositivist literature, his name is treated as synonymous with an unhelpful scientism that separates the field from more constitutive alternatives (Hollis and Smith Reference Hollis and Smith1990, 48–50; Kurki Reference Kurki2006; Reference Kurki2008; Patomäki and Wight Reference Patomäki and Wight2000, 219–22). Milja Kurki, for instance, asserts that the “Humean conception of causation is at the root of disciplinary divisions in IR” (Reference Kurki2006, 190). While Kurki is right to regret the ways the discipline still splinters between “scientific” and more “interpretive” explanations of international politics (Reference Kurki2008, 68–9), it makes little sense to lay these divisions at the feet of Hume. Hume’s combination of politics and economics, along with his effort to ground a term like the balance of power in historical praxis, traverses our current disciplinary boundaries.

A common charge against classical realism is that it privileged state power, while ignoring economic exchange (Ashley Reference Ashley1984; Keohane and Nye Reference Keohane and Nye1977, 8–11; cf. Gilpin Reference Gilpin1984). Waltz’s neorealist account is explicitly economic, in that he likens states, behaving as unitary actors, to competitive firms in a market structure. Yet Waltz’s neorealism downplays the importance of economic interdependence (Reference Waltz1979, 71–2, 89–91), and, for critics, the theory’s structural assumptions give a static picture of both power and economics (Ashley Reference Ashley1984; Guzzini Reference Guzzini1998, 125–41). Hume, by contrast, consistently stressed the relationship between power and plenty. In the Political Discourses, Hume placed “Of the Balance of Power” beside its companion piece, “Of the Balance of Trade.” Political scientists who rely on anthologies for Hume’s “Of the Balance of Power” miss that Hume coupled his analysis of power with an analysis of trade.Footnote ⁶ More than two centuries before international political economy developed as a formal subdiscipline, Hume was treating economics and power politics as inseparable subjects.

Although Hume opened the Political Discourses with a boast that increased trade would secure the “greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994g, 255), he remained ever aware that the interest states take in their commercial greatness can spell war. Mercantilist politicians perceived state power as a measure of a “balance of trade,” and they were prepared to combat other nations believed to threaten Britain’s balance of goods (Haslam Reference Haslam2002; Hont Reference Hont2005). Hume, however, considered such mercantilist theories of relative economic advantage “impossible” to measure. Europeans should not be waging war over the “uncertain facts and suppositions” found in “custom-house books” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994f, 310). Inscribing international rivalries into official economic policy meant commerce risked making war more likely. Healthier trade policy, not to mention a safer Europe, necessitated abandoning this mercantilist mindset.

On the whole, Hume believed states stood to benefit from interconnected commerce. But first, nations must cease viewing “their neighbors with a suspicious eye” and stop considering “all trading states as their rivals” ([1758] Reference Hume and Miller1994k, 328). Hume made this stipulation in “Of the Jealousy of Trade,” a piece published and then reprinted in the throes of the Seven Years’ War. When Hume added “Of the Jealousy of Trade” to his collected Essays and Treatises in 1758, he positioned it between “Of the Balance of Trade” and “Of the Balance of Power.” Political and economic rivalries needed to be analyzed in tandem. As a political economist, Hume prayed for “flourishing commerce” across Europe—encompassing “even France itself” (331). And yet the rhetoric of Renaissance warfare also survives in Hume’s writings. Political jealousies, he feared, were prompting Britain to accrue ever-larger war debts and to cede its national defense to “mercenary strangers” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 341). In another of his Political Discourses, “Of Public Credit” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j), Hume portrayed speculation in public securities as a direct threat to national security. London’s “useless and unactive” stockjobbers, he warned, would outsource Britain’s trade wars to hired soldiers. The expense of these soldiers would not deter speculators who stood to profit off of interest on the debt. However, the rest of the country should be distressed by a debt-cycle in which paid mercenaries could “destroy the nation” (Hume [1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 362; Hont Reference Hont2005, 325–53; Pocock Reference Pocock1985). At least in antiquity, Hume noted, states preparing for war had to “hoard up treasures before-hand.” He contrasted the ancient practice of stockpiling with “our modern expedient” of “mortgag[ing] the public revenues” and “trust[ing] that posterity will pay off the incumbrances contracted by their ancestors.” In this respect, Hume judged “the ancient maxims … more prudent than the modern” (350). Instead of imposing eighteenth-century expectations onto the ancient world, Hume, in this case, found modern war policy wanting. When Hume highlighted recurrent themes in history, he did so not to confirm political dogma but rather to hold contemporary Europeans to account.

Fletcher and Federalizing “The Force and Power of Money”

Hume’s Political Discourses had a partial precursor in Andrew Fletcher of Soulton (1655–1716), the Scottish patriot and fiery critic of standing armies. From a Humean perspective, Fletcher is notable because, despite his republican commitments, Fletcher was fascinated by the dynamics of commercial empire and he searched for ways to apply Machiavelli’s insights to curb the power of great trading cities like London (Robertson Reference Robertson and Robertson1997). In the lead up to the Act of Union (1707) between Scotland and England, Fletcher predicted, as a member of the final Scottish parliament, that union would reduce Scotland to a “conquered province” of the wealthier English ([1703] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997c, 133).Footnote ⁷ But Fletcher was no provincial. He spent over two-thirds of his life outside Scotland, sometimes for reasons of exile but also to pursue his own educational efforts and elaborate book collecting.Footnote ⁸ His dialogue, An Account of a Conversation, is set in lodgings at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames.

Still, Scots were supposed to see this London backdrop as ominous. With trade now “the golden ball, for which all nations of the world are contending,” every city would seek to capture trade for itself ([1703] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997b, 193). Fletcher’s character in the dialogue cautions that the nations that united with ancient Rome never received security guarantees (196). Modern trade made the relationship between weaker states and a dominant center even more precarious: “For wars, besides that they are become universal, are now wholly managed by the force and power of money” (205). Fletcher was recalling Machiavelli’s maxim that “money is not the sinews of war.” In the Discourses, Machiavelli had insisted money is something good soldiers win on the battlefield, when they acquire their enemies’ booty. For, if the Romans “had wished to make war with money rather than with steel, all the treasure of the world would not have been enough” ([1513–17] Reference Machiavelli, Mansfield and Tarcov1996, 148). Although Fletcher opposed Roman expansionism, Machiavelli’s words presented a powerful rebuke to those who assumed domination could be purchased with gold and silver.

An advocate for peaceful commerce, Hume was not bothered that Britain employed nowhere near the proportion of citizen soldiers found in Livy’s early Rome ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994g, 258). What distressed him was Britain’s rate of war spending. Here Hume aligned with Fletcher. Reflecting on the recent War of Austrian Succession, Hume observed, in the essay “Of Money” that “The English fleet, during the late war, required as much money to support it as all the Roman legions, which kept the whole world in subjection, during the time of the emperors” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994i, 282). Wealthier nations with a larger money supply could, in the short term, afford to wage costlier wars. But this often entailed hiring soldiers, as borne out by the fact that “all rich and trading countries from Carthage to Great Britain and Holland, have employed mercenary troops, which they hired from their poorer neighbors” (282).Footnote ⁹ Hume’s comparison to Carthage was not a compliment. In A Discourse of Government Fletcher forcefully denounced the practice of hiring troops “who make a trade of war.” Carthage lacked the geographic advantages of Venice or Holland and yet, like these city-states, had “used mercenary forces.” It did not come as a surprise to Fletcher that the Carthaginians were “brought to the brink of ruin” by hired soldiers, before they were “beaten in three wars, and at last subdued by the Romans” ([1698] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997a, 14). Montesquieu also pointed to the Carthaginians as a cautionary tale. His Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline observed that the Carthaginians, “whose minds were wholly turned to traffic,” expired much faster than the Romans because “gold and silver exhaust themselves; but virtue, constancy, force and poverty, never do” ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000, 112).Footnote ¹⁰ Hume offered his own analogy between war spending in contemporary Britain and ancient Carthage to remind his countrymen that commerce cannot underwrite empire.

As an alternative to expansion, Fletcher proposed a federation of small states in the spirit of the Achaean league. His Account of a Conversation ends with a vision for a modern Greek federation, with Europe divided into “ten portions,” each further separated into 10 or 12 sovereign cities ([1703] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997b, 207). By this design, no one region would dominate its neighbors. Fletcher thought parity in size would regulate against the ambitions of a modern Venice or Sparta—each of which had tried to expand, despite being “altogether unfit to retain conquests” (210). Several commentators note that Fletcher modeled his federations after the second-best “mode” laid out in book 2, chapter 4 of Machiavelli’s Discourses (Hont Reference Hont2005, 262–3; Robertson Reference Robertson, Phillipson and Skinner1993, 363; Spector Reference Spector2006, 36n82). Machiavelli had recommended Rome’s strategy for expansion, whereby the Romans enlisted a series of weaker state “partners” ([1513–17] Reference Machiavelli, Mansfield and Tarcov1996, 136). For Fletcher, such a partnership put poorer states like Scotland at a permanent disadvantage and was therefore untenable. Nevertheless, Fletcher agreed with Machiavelli that the Athenian and Spartan mode, by which small but ambitious states subdued “direct subjects,” was equally unsustainable. In his admiration for the Achaean League, Fletcher borrowed from Machiavelli’s description of smaller republics, whose constitutions kept them within a “fixed limit.” These states were powerful enough to defend themselves but, balanced against their neighbors, would not become “desirous of dominating” (Machiavelli [1513–17] Reference Machiavelli, Mansfield and Tarcov1996, 137).

Hume pursued a similar compromise within Machiavelli’s model. Though Hume never went so far as to call for a federative Europe,Footnote ¹¹ he shared Fletcher’s concern that military spending exacerbated tensions between the London center and the British periphery. War debts exposed the inherent instability of the nation’s foreign policy. Britain could not survive as both republic and empire. In “Of Public Credit,” Hume connected the policy of “mortgag[ing] the public revenues” to Britain’s “neglect of military discipline”—a connection that Hume thought could only spell “poverty, impotence, and subjection to foreign powers” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 351). Speculation in state securities emboldened a new class of “half merchants, half stock-holders,” who displayed little national loyalty and who might flee if Britain ever tried to halt interest payments during wartime. Meanwhile, Hume wrote, “national debts cause a mighty confluence of people and riches to the capital,” even as taxes to pay the interest on the debt were “levied in the provinces.” Hume asked whether it was indeed in the “public interest, that so many privileges should be conferred on London, which has already arrived at such an enormous size” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 354). London’s outsized influence meant that Britain’s national defense rested on an unsustainable tax cycle for servicing the debt, which would soon sink the government into “languor, inactivity, and impotence” (360).

In his Account of a Conversation, Fletcher vividly suggested that the wealth differential between a “vast city” such as London and the rest of the country made the capital:

In “Of Public Credit,” Hume also suggested that the body politic was in peril. As he said of London, “the head is undoubtedly too large for the body” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 354). At his most alarmist, Hume feared that a capital city reliant on debt speculation would upend the balance of power, especially when the French monarchy had greater freedom to override the demands of creditors during wartime:

Nothing about this dire outcome follows from a law of politics. On the contrary, Hume presents the balance of power as a practice demanding each generation’s vigilance, in the face of an unthinking reliance on credit and mercenary arms.

Hume and Historical IR

But if it is plain Hume was no neorealist, how does his thought relate to other, more historically minded modes of IR? It might at first seem promising to read Hume in light of the so-called “English School,” an approach which, in the words of Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, is “more concerned with the historical than the contemporary, with the normative than the scientific” (Butterfield and Wight [1966] Reference Butterfield, Wight, Butterfield and Wight1996, 12). Hume’s appeal to the “attention and assistance” needed to preserve a balanced Europe resembles Butterfield’s argument that the balance of power requires a conscious commitment and “constant attention.” For Butterfield, this attention entails acknowledgment that the balance of power is at best “a precarious thing” (Butterfield [1966] Reference Butterfield, Butterfield and Wight1996, 147). Indeed in “Of the Protestant Succession,” another piece printed in the Political Discourses, Hume referred to “the precarious balance of power.” If Britain did not take charge of its war debts, Hume argued, the balance would give way to “conquest” ([1748] Reference Hume and Miller1994c, 511). Butterfield, however, began his own essay, “The Balance of Power,” with a protest that Hume had overstated his case. Butterfield found Hume’s survey of ancient foreign policy impressive but came away convinced that the balance principle was a modern development. Ignoring Hume’s effort to situate the balance of power’s precariousness within the context of modern British indebtedness, Butterfield dismissed Hume’s history as flawed (Reference Butterfield, Butterfield and Wight1996, 132–33).

As for Wight, he classed Hume as a “realist” in his typology of “the three traditions” in IR (i.e., realist, rationalist, and revolutionist). Wight counted Hume as a “realist”—or, as Wight frequently preferred, “a Machiavellian”—because Hume favored the inductive method over a priori reasoning and described the balance of power as a basic political strategy (Wight Reference Wight1991, 17, 171). This is reasonable enough, and Hume’s thought does share resonances with Machiavelli (Hont Reference Hont2010; Whelan Reference Whelan2004). But the application of Wight’s “three traditions” can veer in an ahistorical direction. In the most recent attempt to judge Hume’s contribution to international theory, Edwin Van de Haar appraises Hume according to Wight’s typology, although Van de Haar labels Hume a “rationalist,” not a realist. This reclassification rests on a reading of the balance of power.Footnote ¹² Van de Haar groups Hume with internationalist rationalism on the grounds that Hume saw “the balance of power mechanism” as the key regulator of international society (Reference Van de Haar2008, 227, 237–240). Van de Haar repeatedly refers to Hume’s commitment to the balance of power as a “mechanism” (Reference Van de Haar2008, 227, 230, 232–3, 238), though the term is nowhere to be found in Hume’s essay. Such a label unwittingly agrees with Morgenthau that the balance of power “is a metaphor taken from the field of “mechanics,” which, being “mechanically conceived,” requires a “quantitative criterion” (Reference Morgenthau1948, 151).Footnote ¹³ Van de Harr would also seem to affirm the assumptions of postpositivists who dismiss the balance of power as a “simple unintended Humean mechanism” (Patomäki Reference Patomäki2007, 580, emphasis added). Readers of Hume are better off foregoing twentieth-century typologies.

In an effort to move past “mechanistic” and “rationalist” divisions in IR, Kurki contends that theorists of all stripes should be attentive to “common-sensical” connections when explaining historical and social processes (Kurki Reference Kurki2006). But Kurki misses that such a “common-sensical” solution arises out of Hume’s own political writings. Hume, we should not forget, presented the balance of power as “founded so much on common sense and obvious reasoning” and took his evidence from historical agents, such as Hiero of Syracuse and the successors of Alexander the Great ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 335–37). IR specialists nervous about the field’s overrationalism might object to Hume’s assertion of “obvious reasoning.” Yet Friedrich Kratochwil maintains that Hume saw arrangements like the balance of power as “historically variable” (Reference Kratochwil, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008, 446). From a constructivist angle, Kratochwil turns to Hume because he thinks Hume offers an antidote to a realism that does little more than restate “the balance-of-power period, dressed up as universal theory” (Reference Kratochwil2011, 26). It is important to note that, immediately after calling the balance of power “obvious,” Hume added a corollary to his argument. Just because the balance of power was “at present” emerging as an explicit object of study “among speculative reasoners” did not mean these speculators had successfully enacted a balanced foreign policy. The modern balance, Hume observed, “has not, in practice, an authority much more extensive among those who govern the world” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 338). For Hume, philosophical speculation regarding the balance does not stand in for its real-world practice.

Back to the Basics of Balance

In was in the course of his search for commonsensical evidence of balancing practices that Hume looked to the Greek leagues. The reason eighteenth-century Europeans assume “the ancients were entirely ignorant of the balance of power,” Hume said, “seems to be drawn from the Roman history more than the Grecian” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 335). Fletcher made this same point about the loss of historical memory. The “mighty power of the Roman commonwealth,” Fletcher regretted, had “deprived posterity of a perfect knowledge of the tendency of that constitution [i.e., the Achaean league].” This was unfortunate because the Achaean league offered a rare example of a constitution not “framed for conquests” ([1703] Reference Fletcher and Robertson1997b, 209–10). Hume likewise sought to recover a memory of ancient counterweights, when republics like Athens “always threw themselves into the lighter scale, and endeavored to preserve the balance” (333). After beginning “Of the Balance of Power” with a brief survey of Xenophon, Demosthenes, and Thucydides, Hume concluded that, at the very least, the idea of balancing must have influenced “the wiser and more experienced princes and politicians” (338). Yet, as we have seen, Hume had earlier asserted the opposite—declaring, in 1741, “the balance of power is a secret in politics, fully known only to the present age” ([1741] Reference Hume and Miller1994a, 93).

The prolonged War of Austrian Succession helps explain Hume’s reappraisal of the balance of power’s relevance across history. By the time he published the Discourses, the British national debt had crested toward 80 million pounds—almost double its size in 1741 (Brewer Reference Brewer1989, 114–15), when Hume issued his first edition of Essays. By 1752, Hume could see how the animosity spurring his countrymen into repeated battles with France was reminiscent of ancient warfare, resembling the “ancient Greek spirit of jealous emulation” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 339). In hindsight, Hume wondered whether Britain’s “imprudent vehemence” toward France had made Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress and head of the Habsburgs, “inflexible in her terms” (339). The ancients were capable of balance-of-power calculations, but so too were modern Europeans capable of irrational jealousies.

After the war ended in 1748, Hume returned home from his embassy service and rededicated himself to a study of the classics. He passed the next several years at his family estate in Ninewells, where he read widely in Latin and Greek (Baumstark Reference Baumstark2010). A compendium of notes in Hume’s hand, known among Hume specialists as the “early memoranda”—and which likely date to the late 1740s—list observations from an extraordinary range of sources (Hume Reference Humen.d.; Mossner Reference Mossner1948).Footnote ¹⁴ The memoranda include a number of political observations from classical authors, such as Thucydides, Polybius, and Xenophon, and read something like commonplace book entries. Hume recorded a variety of political and economic examples acknowledging a sense of “Ballance” in both ancient and modern authors. He refers to Britain’s “Ballance of Exchange to Germany” and elsewhere offers the general remark that, “There must be a Ballance in all Governments” (Mossner Reference Mossner1948, nos. 19, 76). “The notion of the Balance of Power,” Hume observes, seems to be contained in Demosthenes Oration” for the Megalopolitans (no. 232). In a revealing trio of entries, Hume records, “Perseus Ambassadors to the Rhodians spoke a Style like the Modern with regard the Ballance of Power but are condemn’d by Livy Lib. 42. Cap. 46” (no. 164). Just above, Hume notes that Livy’s portrayal of Perseus’s support in the Macedonian war was “remarkable” (no. 163). Then, in the entry that follows, Hume writes, “Livy so thoughtless an Historian that he condemns all the Grecians who favour’d Perseus. Cap. 42. Cap. 63” (no. 164). Livy’s description of how neighboring Greek rulers weighed their options during the Second Macedonian War captured Hume’s attention, even if Hume objected to Livy’s framing of events.

Livy reported in his History of Rome that, with conflict between Rome and Macedon looming, the most prudent Greeks

According to Livy, the envoys Perseus sent to the Rhodians declared that the Rhodians “must act to prevent authority and power over everything coming into the hands of a single people,” lest the Rhodians soon have recourse to no one but the Romans (42:46). This passage offers insight into Hume’s note that the ambassadors “spoke a Style like the Modern with regard the Ballance of Power.” It seems Hume took the envoys’ words as evidence that ancient actors thought in terms of allying against the stronger power, though he faulted Livy for underemphasizing this dynamic. Hume’s notes imply that Livy failed to comprehend why the states that were, by Livy’s account, “under the greatest obligation to Rome” might have had an interest in the success of Perseus (Livy [27–9 BCE] Reference Sage and Schlesinger1938, 42:63).

Tatsuya Sakamoto observes that Livy is the most cited of the many ancient authors in the memoranda. Moreover, Hume’s twenty-one entries on Livy appear consecutively, with Hume clearly organizing an interpretation of Livy and early Roman politics. In spite of Hume’s critique of Livy for being “so thoughtless an Historian,” Sakamoto rightly argues that the memoranda reveal Hume “forming his own views on Roman society and politics through an intellectual dialogue with Livy” (Reference Sakamoto2011, 142). A spirited dialogue with Livy is of course a Machiavellian endeavor, and in a lengthy footnote to the original version of “Balance of Power,” Hume would justify his study of Livy with the explicit help of Machiavelli. Addressing those who might dismiss Livy’s account of early Rome as “fabulous,” Hume countered, “Is not Machiavel’s comment on Livy (a work surely of great judgment and genius) founded entirely on this period” (Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 634a)? The suggestion that modern writers might have something to learn from ancient politics stands in contrast to another memoranda entry, in which Hume, borrowing from Nicholas Barbon, remarked, “There is not a Word of Trade in all of Matchiavel [sic].” In A Discourse on Trade ([1690] Reference Barbon1905), Barbon had stated,

As of 1741, Hume was inclined to agree with Barbon.Footnote ¹⁵ In “Of Civil Liberty,” the same essay in which he judged the balance of power a modern innovation, Hume had dismissed Machiavelli for overlooking trade “as an affair of state” ([1741] Reference Hume and Miller1994a, 88). But, as he drafted his thoughts for the Discourses, Hume seems to have been reexamining what, exactly, it meant to count economics as a matter of foreign affairs. Hume’s collection of notes on ancient and modern trade, coupled with his essays on the balance of trade and the balance of power, suggest he came to believe state competition deserved to be placed in a longer durée.

Reconsidering Montesquieu

Another explanation for Hume’s reevaluation of an ancient balance of power arises from his encounter with Montesquieu. Hume eagerly read The Spirit of the Laws in the autumn of 1748, and he wrote to Montesquieu to say the Frenchman had written a work which would attract the “highest esteem from all nations and the admiration of all centuries.”Footnote ¹⁶ Hume’s praise has naturally led readers to wonder what sort of influence the Spirit of Laws bore on Hume’s conception of the Discourses. Both authors treat politics as a comparative study of constitutions, and neither harbor much affection for the politics of ancient Rome (Harris Reference Harris2015, 250).Footnote ¹⁷ But when it comes to questions of debt, expansion, and the balance of power, scholars should not neglect Montesquieu’s earlier work, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000).

As detailed below, Hume’s “Of the Balance the Power” reveals an unnoticed reliance on the Considerations. Beyond a brief comment by Raymond Aron in Peace and War, neither IR scholars nor historians of political thought have connected Hume’s essay with Montesquieu’s earlier text. Aron noticed that Hume and Montesquieu each posited the balance of power as an answer to Rome’s “universal monarchy.” Each, he said, perceived that “the policy of equilibrium is rationally preferable in terms of historical experience and moral values” ([1962] Reference Aron, Howard and Fox1966, 127). That is, Hume and Montesquieu both describe the balance in a rational but historically inflected way. Equilibrium, in Aron’s gloss, is preferable to the alternative and therefore “historically justified” by “those who fear a universal monarchy and desire the independence of independent states” (127, emphasis added). A rational fear of empire, combined with a recognition of economic desire and the temptation of modern debt, inspired Hume’s and Montesquieu’s respective views of the balance of power vis-à-vis the ancients.

In the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that England possessed all of the geographic advantages of a maritime empire like Athens, but without the “jealousy” that led the Athenians to abandon good domestic government. England’s mixed constitution, Montesquieu said, prevented “hatred, envy, jealousy, and the ardor for enriching.” Abroad, England was inclined to “extend its commerce more than its dominion” ([1748] Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1989, 325, 328). Much like Hume in “Of Civil Liberty,” Montesquieu drew a distinction between the ancients and moderns. The Spirit of the Laws separated the severity of the ancient world from the politics of modern trade, emphasizing that Rome never exhibited a “jealousy over commerce” (381).Footnote ¹⁸ The Romans waged war for glory and power, not economic advantage. In contrast to Roman pillage, Montesquieu singled out the invention of letters of exchange as a source for modern peace. Innovations in currency prevented the prince from pillaging his subjects’ silver. In contemporary times, “the richest trader had only invisible goods, which could be sent everywhere and leave no trace anywhere” (389). A key component of this commercial freedom was the country’s “secure credit.” Patriotic citizens would willingly defend their state to prevent the loss of their credit, and, for this reason, Montesquieu thought a free state “might burden itself with harsher imposts than even the most absolute prince would dare make his subjects bear” (327).

Montesquieu posited that a commercial nation like England “would have secure credit because it would borrow itself and would pay itself.” Such a state could “assert against its enemies an immense fictional wealth that the trust and government of its government would make real” ([1748] Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1989, 327). If this commercial island (i.e., England), became “the center of negotiations in Europe,” its ministers would negotiate in better faith because they would be answerable to the people (329). At his most optimistic, Montesquieu announced that, thanks to letters of exchange, “One had begun to be cured of Machiavellianism, and one will continue to be cured of it” (389).

But Hume was not so sure that England’s credit system was a source of security. He agreed with Montesquieu’s condemnation of empire, yet Hume was less confident that letters of exchange could successfully put the Roman model to rest. He worried that states’ manipulation of credit enabled government ministers to trust in “temporary expedients,” exacerbating their reliance on expensive foreign arms ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 351). In “Of Public Credit,” Hume complained that the idea that “the public is no weaker upon account of its debts” and the notion that borrowing is “like transferring money from the right hand to the left” amounted to “specious” reasoning (356). It is not clear Montesquieu had complete confidence in this reasoning, either.

In his own chapter “On Public Debts,” Montesquieu cautioned that ministers who thought “it was good for a state to owe itself” had mistaken paper currency for actual value ([1748] Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1989, 418).Footnote ¹⁹ Montesquieu raised the possibility that a commercial nation might become so “sovereignly jealous” of its neighbors that it would resent others’ prosperity more than it enjoyed its own (328). In his 1749 letter to Montesquieu, Hume confirmed that Montesquieu was right in this regard and reflected, “We have in England too great a jealousy of the balance of commerce” (Reference Hume and Grieg1932, 1:136). Hume’s letter examined the pros and cons of a public debt. On one hand, Montesquieu was “very fair” to enumerate the ways in which a debt lowers a nation’s exchange, raises imposts, and rewards the idle. On the other, merchants who held capital in public funds would circulate wealth more readily and could thus sustain a larger market (137). But in the Discourses, Hume would come down against the pro-debt arguments put forth in his letter. Even if the Romans went to war for reasons of conquest—not a jealousy of trade—commercial Europeans had not abandoned thoughts of ancient imperium. The current credit system had not cured Europe of Machiavellianism; the lessons of Rome were not yet moot.

Hume’s solution to what his letter called the “jealousy of the balance of commerce” came in the form of a more serious commitment to the balance of power. To rid Europe of Roman expansionism, Hume looked to Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline—a work that kept Machiavelli’s Discourses constantly in view.Footnote ²⁰ In the Considerations, Montesquieu stressed the violent military expansion on which the Roman model rested. He began with the constant wars of Romulus and his successors; these were wars that pleased Rome’s citizens because they stood to reap the spoils ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000, 93). Rome prospered off of pillage, not commerce. Montesquieu’s message was that an eighteenth-century Europe centered on commerce was incompatible with the Roman mode. Compared with the Spirit of the Laws, however, the Considerations did not imply that innovations of commerce and credit could eliminate the temptation to follow Rome.

In the Considerations, Montesquieu emphasized that the rest of the world should not have stood by as an “idle Spectator” to Rome’s acquisitiveness. For, as soon as Rome conquered Carthage, it continued “to invade all” ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000, 121). Montesquieu here considered how Greece’s Aetolians, Achaeans, and Boetians reacted to Rome’s universal aims. Had the Greek states united, they would have been “invincible.” In this era, “Greece maintained itself by a kind of balance,” until, alas, the Romans “broke the equilibrium” (123). Montesquieu placed a good deal of blame on Philip V of Macedon. Philip should have known that his treaty with Hannibal signaled an ill-will toward Rome. After Carthage’s defeat, the “natural” response would have been for Philip “to unite all the Greeks with himself, in order to prevent the Romans from settling in their country” (124). But persuaded by Hannibal to “stand neutral,” Philip was soon after swept into a war in which he served as “the instrument” of Roman victories (127).

Hume offered the same interpretation in “Of the Balance of Power.” Up until the second Macedonian war, “the balance of power was, of itself, sufficiently secured in Greece.” However, the Greeks never managed to mount a “general combination or confederacy” against the Romans—even if such a confederacy “might naturally have been expected” after Rome’s rapid conquests ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 334–35). The stakes, Hume said, were nothing less than “a contest for universal empire.” And yet

Philip’s “absurd treaty” with the Carthaginians encouraged the supposition that the ancients were ignorant of the balance of power. Philip was partly responsible for the fact that Roman history overshadowed Greek balancing.

In his analysis of Roman aggrandizement, Montesquieu drew an analogy between Emperor Augustus’s conquest of Egyptian treasure and the modern discovery of gold in the Indies. Under Augustus, the wealth of the Ptolemies doubled Rome’s revenue and made gold and silver common in Europe. For a time, such wealth enabled the Romans “to pay very considerable taxes” ([1734] Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000, 227). But the Considerations underscored a paradox: state expansion engenders a taste for greater spending, which an overextended empire eventually cannot afford. In its late empire, Rome tried to buy off its invaders, yet “peace itself could not be purchased.” Even if peace were “sold,” Rome’s neighbors would extort Rome again and again (233). Machiavelli’s maxim that money is not the sinews of war was still operative.

Hume followed Montesquieu’s train of thought. In “Of Money,” Hume paraphrased this precise passage on the spoils of the Ptolemies: “For money, after the conquest of Ægypt, seems to have been nearly in as great plenty at Rome, as it is at present in the richest of the European kingdoms.” Hume associated the discovery of Egyptian treasures under Augustus with British military spending during the War of Austrian Succession. Such spending, Hume remarked, had required as much investment as when Rome subjected the world “during the time of the emperors” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994i, 282–83, n3). Like Montesquieu, Hume associated an overreliance on gold and silver with the contradictions of modern empire. In “Of the Balance of Power,” he recalled how the “danger of universal monarchy,” posed most recently by emperor Charles V, “derived chiefly from mines of gold and silver” and soon brought the House of Austria “to decay” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 338). Hume connected military spending, which temporarily aggrandizes “enormous monarchies,” with the wars that these monarchies eventually wage on “remote and barbarous frontiers.” Such remote battles are fought by “mercenary strangers, without zeal, without attachment, without honour” (341). The Considerations had warned against prodigal soldiers assuming sovereign power, and Hume likewise opined against the mercenaries ready to fight only for “pay and plunder” (Montesquieu Reference Montesquieu, Weil and Courtney2000, 220; Hume [1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 339–40). Hume’s critique of Britain’s credit system supported Montesquieu’s conclusions on the costs of empire.

Industriousness over Emulation

In arguing that the logic of the balance of power could not “have escaped antiquity,” Hume wanted to prove to his eighteenth-century audience that they were not as different from the ancients as they might suppose ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 337). Had the Greeks not abandoned their equilibrium, the city-states of the Hellenistic period could have countered Rome. By analogy, eighteenth-century Europeans had the capacity to preserve the balance of power, so long as they did not reenact the “ancient Greek spirit of jealous emulation” and did not follow the “careless and supine” path of the Athenians ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994e, 339–40). The “strong jealousy” with which Europeans guarded the balance of trade was misplaced. States should not obsess over their relative proportion of currency. According to Hume’s famous “specie flow” mechanism, currency—like water—finds its natural equilibrium.Footnote ²¹ The balance of power, on the other hand, demands a conscious and persistent effort. Mercantilists preoccupied with preserving a national balance of trade provoked the very jealousies that undermined this diplomatic balance.

In The Political Economy of International Relations, Robert Gilpin refers on several occasions to Hume’s “specie-flow” model as a rationalist mechanism that assumes market “automaticity” (Reference Gilpin1987, 121, 131, 168–9, 173, 366). Gilpin groups Hume with the early “liberals” who opposed state mercantilism, or what Gilpin designates “economic nationalism” (Reference Gilpin1987, 12, 31–4). According to Gilpin’s definition, liberal political economy is a theory that, unlike economic nationalism, “separates economics and politics from one another” and that supposes “each sphere operates according to particular rules and logic of its own” (Reference Gilpin1987, 26–7). Yet, although plenty of theorists have analyzed trade at the exclusion of political power, Hume was never among them. We must not discount that Hume titled his most economic set of writings the Political Discourses. At no point did Hume cordon off political thinking. Gilpin defined his own view of “political economy” as the study of “the reciprocal and dynamic interaction in international relations of the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of power” (Reference Gilpin1975, 43). International Political Economy scholars interested in this interaction would do well to revisit Hume, for whom the political dynamics of political economy—or what Hume named “the jealousy of trade”—represented the most pressing danger for eighteenth-century state relations (Hont Reference Hont2005).

Hume joined an analysis of political and the economic forces in his focus on civic industriousness. He argued that, rather than guarding specie, nations ought to encourage the “honest industry” that keeps citizens active. In another of his Discourses, “Of Refinement in the Arts” (originally titled “Of Luxury”), Hume refuted the old civic-republican thesis that the arts sap citizens of a capacity to defend themselves. Those who decried luxury and who celebrated “the old rigid Roman virtue” had mistaken “the causes of the disorders in the Roman state.” Hume reiterated that Rome’s disorders “really proceeded from an ill modelled government, and the unlimited extent of conquests” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994b, 270, 276). The industriousness required to sustain a luxury economy would instead function “as a kind of storehouse of labour, which in the exigencies of state, may be turned to the public service” (272). Hume even said sovereigns should view luxury as a public benefit, since during wartime, the state could “lay claim” to the “superfluous hands” otherwise employed in producing luxury goods and redirect that labor “in fleets and armies” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994g, 256–7). This suggestion departs rather sharply from Gilpin’s definition of liberal political economy. Yet Hume’s discussion of “superfluous hands” is not about embracing economic nationalism, nor is it about advocating a permanent war footing. His goal was to counter the common republican assumption that a tolerance for luxury would spell the fate of Rome. British citizens ought to fear their leaders’ jealousy of trade and speculation on war debts, not honest manufacturing. By contrast, nations with a history of prohibiting luxury had seen their subjects “sink into indolence” and “become useless to the public” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 272). Countries looking to curtail their reliance on far-off mercenaries should recognize the benefits of domestic manufacturing.

Against those who would attribute the “effeminacy of the Italians to their luxury,” Hume referred readers to Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia:

This is a summary of the opening pages of Guicciardini’s history, where Guicciardini relayed the dynamics that precipitated France’s invasion of the Italian peninsula and the loss of Italy’s “state of balance.”Footnote ²² Guicciardini would serve as one of the most frequently cited sources in Hume’s History of the House of Tudor (1759)—a work in which Hume explored England’s place in the larger European balance of power and in which he continued his investigation into the prehistory of the eighteenth-century states system. In Guicciardini’s narrative, as in Hume’s History, the balance of power represents neither a natural nor lawlike state of affairs. Guicciardini understood that ascendant states could easily sacrifice the modo bilanciate in their race for relative domination. Indeed, a desire to abandon interstate balance set off the Italian wars, when Venice sought to become “hegemon [imperio] of all of Italy,” and when Milan, Florence, and Naples then eyed each other with “emulation and jealousy” ([1537] Reference Guicciardini and Alexander1969, 7–8). Following Guicciardini, Hume’s Discourses made plain that the real reason the Italians dropped the sword was because they developed a taste for empire and hired mercenaries to do their bidding. To avoid the outcome of the Italian wars, when battle “became the business of soldiers of fortune,” Hume made a plea for manufacturers over mercenaries. “The arts,” he said “have no such effect in enervating either the mind or body… . [I]ndustry, their inseparable attendant, adds new force to both” ([1752] Reference Hume and Miller1994j, 274). Artistic industry could renew a nation’s strength.