David Hume and the Aristocracy of Inclination

All throughout David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, Literary, we find a curious smattering of seemingly contradictory claims about the possibility of, advantage of, and existence of an "elite" segment within society. In particular, Hume is ambivalent about the existence of a cognitive elite, or a group of people with excessive ability to think, philosophize, and engage in the "nobler arts" of life. Though I believe that what we’ve read of Hume's work is marked by a deep belief in the fundamental equality of mankind, I also contend that this work openly admits the existence of a deeply inequitable distribution of a certain quality which leads men to vastly different outcomes in their work and their lives. The group that benefits from this unequal distribution is what I'll call the Aristocracy of Inclination. It effectively constitutes an elite, and it somewhat unsurprisingly counts Hume as a member.

Hume is clear that he believes most of humanity to be endowed with strikingly similar degrees of mental and artistic competence, on both the level of the individual and that of the population. As for the individual, Hume tells us that, "though the persons, who cultivate the sciences with such astonishing success... be always few, in all nations and all ages; it is

impossible but a share of the same spirit and genius must be antecedently diffused throughout the people among whom they arise."1 For that of the population, he says that "the natural genius of mankind be the same in all ages, and in almost all countries, (as seems to be the truth).”2 He makes allowances for differences of “fortune, and endowments of the body,”3 but overall his picture of human cognitive ability is that of an equitably distributed quantity. To call Hume anti-egalitarian would simply be wrong, and yet that conspicuous word "almost" in the latter quote gives the slightest hint that to call him an egalitarian would not be telling the whole truth either.

And yet, it is even more abundantly clear that Hume's landscape of humanity is not a flat one; he believes in the existence of intrinsic hierarchy, reaching even as far down as the level of biology. He begins his transition into a discussion of the genders by saying: "As nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body"4 and repeatedly uses phrases like "mere men of the ...