Paul Sagar has written a theoretically engaging and historically rich book that offers political theorists and anyone concerned with the origins and limits of political obligation a way beyond Hobbes’s sovereignty-centered theory of the state. Sagar attempts to bring a distinctively Scottish way of approaching political obligation to the fore for political theorists while insisting that such an approach is more than mere political sociology. He asserts that Hume gives us a pioneering theory of the state without sovereignty, grounded in the “opinion of mankind”—an amorphous, contested amalgam of beliefs about power and authority. Contrary to Hobbes, who remains the central interlocutor of the book, Hume and later Smith reject the notion that there is a “final, philosophically identifiable, and stable foundation of ‘sovereign’ authority” (p. 10) in favor of a more historically plausible and empirically based theory of political obligation. Over the course of the book, Sagar aims to show the advantages of this approach over the Hobbesian one and to make a place for Hume and Smith as political theorists proper, rather than solely as economists or moral philosophers. I suggest an alternative to Sagar’s reading of ambition for Smith in this review, as well as an opportunity I saw in its narrative arc; yet I cannot praise it enough for its rigorous treatment of Hume’s and Smith’s political theories as serious alternatives to a Hobbesian theory of political obligation.
As Sagar himself highlights, the book is broadly about the eighteenth-century debate about sociability and how Hume and Smith address the question to central to that debate: How might human beings form long and lasting societies in a modern world marked by pervasive economic inequality and social hierarchy? Sagar structures the book by discussing three possible points of departure to this question taken by modern political theorists: first, in Chapters 1 and 2, Sagar develops Hobbes’s innovative account of representation and sovereignty, which solves the sociability problem created by natural egoism through the institution of an artificial person who represents the interests of his subjects but is also independent of them. In Chapters 1 and 4, he discusses Mandeville and Rousseau, who both take deception, whether in prehistory or after the establishment of civil society, to be the linchpin in establishing sociable relations among otherwise antagonistic human beings. Finally, in Chapters 3, 5, and 6, he elaborates on Hume’s and Smith’s insistence on natural authority (or perceptions of it that rely on our sympathy with the rich and great) as the source of our capacity to form large, enduring societies. Along the way, he provides an excellent analysis of Montesquieu that reveals the baron’s role as an important precursor to the theory of the state without sovereignty, one that Sagar sees fully realized in Hume and Smith. This is particularly evident in Montesquieu’s pioneering use of the term “sovereign” to “denote whichever group or individual happened to hold decision-making authority, particularly with regard to legislative power, at a given time in a given place” (p. 187).
Sagar succeeds in casting in a new light what might be otherwise familiar arguments in this Enlightenment-era debate. Against Richard Tuck’s view (“The Utopianism of Leviathan,” in “Leviathan” after 350 Years, 2004), he highlights what Hobbes sees as the enduring threat to sociability posed by pride coupled with the drive for self-preservation; he smartly shows the origin of a theory of popular sovereignty and representation rooted in selfishness or what Mandeville called “self-liking” rather than calls for political legitimacy (pp. 47–48); he recasts Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages as the missing “middle part” between the portrayal of beastlike natural man at the end of the First Part of the Discourse on Inequality and the recognizable human beings who cooperate and use language at the beginning of the Second Part; he insists that Humean sympathy and Rousseauan (natural) pity were “fundamentally identical” in their capacity to render us sociable (p. 151); and most innovatively, he reconstructs what a “legitimate” government might look like for Smith, using arguments from the Lectures on Jurisprudence (pp. 204–10). Although Sagar’s debts to István Hont are many and obvious throughout the text, he makes good on his promise to articulate a new and complementary “alternative” to Hont’s framework for understanding the modern state (p. 9). In sum, Sagar is a meticulous reader of all the Enlightenment thinkers he treats, and specialists and new readers alike will profit from his often novel and always instructive retelling of the emergence of our contemporary understanding of political obligation.
My only minor interpretive differences from Sagar stem from his treatment of Smith and how he conceptualizes Smith’s relationship with Rousseau. Unlike Sagar, I read the famous passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the “poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition” (p. 174) in light of what Smith says elsewhere about ambition (in passages Sagar himself quotes on p. 176). It seems odd to me to remove status concerns from and neutralize the negative tone in Smith’s account of the ambitious if futile pursuit of the poor man’s son, given that Smith explicitly identifies shared sympathy as the end of all ambitious pursuits. Although Sagar is correct to highlight that, for Smith, we often mistake the means of happiness for the end, and that such mistakes in fact help ensure that more have the actual means to achieve happiness than would be the case if we were fully informed about our interest and merely self-interested, he misses Smith’s insistence on mutual sympathy itself as an important means to happiness. As Smith contends, mutual sympathy gives us “that relief which nothing can afford [us] but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with [our] own” (Theory of Moral Sentiments [TSM], I.i.4.7), which is critical because the “chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved” (TMS, I.ii.5.1). Even though the good opinion that other people hold of us might not be the immediate cause of any particular individual’s effort to attain wealth, it is clearly the reason why we value wealth as such for Smith.
Relatedly, I wondered whether Sagar’s investment in divorcing Smith’s conception of ambition from vanity was the driving force in his decision to include a chapter on Rousseau. This chapter, although incredibly sharp in its identification of the key shortcomings of the Discourse on Inequality, seemed less natural than one devoted to Montesquieu, given the unique approach to sovereignty that the latter made available to Hume and Smith. Sagar seems to include a chapter on Rousseau only because others see Smith as indebted to him (incorrectly, he strongly contends); Sagar insists that Smith was “largely unmoved” (p. 167) by Rousseau’s concerns about the enduring challenge posed to commercial society by amour-propre.
These questions nevertheless do nothing to diminish the real worth of Sagar’s careful study, which will be an invaluable resource to anyone interested in normative questions about political legitimacy. By bringing Hume’s and Smith’s empirically minded understanding of authority to bear on critical questions about state legitimacy, Sagar has made a powerful case for considering Scottish Enlightenment political theory as integral to understanding the justifications for the modern state, as well as how we might think through political obligations beyond it.
