Reason and Experience in David Hume's Specie-flow Mechanism

Ariadna Cazenave

Autores/as

Ariadna Cazenave

Palabras clave:

David Hume, Mecanismo especie-flujo, Leyes causales, Leyes económicas, Economía política

Resumen

En sus “escritos económicos”, David Hume desarrolló una de las primeras versiones del “mecanismo especie-flujo”. Tal formulación le valió un lugar destacado en la literatura sobre historia del pensamiento económico, que la ubicó en el marco de las discusiones económicas prevalecientes en la transición de las doctrinas mercantilistas a las liberales. Sin embargo, esa literatura no prestó suficiente atención a las motivaciones filosóficas del autor y al lugar que los “escritos económicos” ocuparon en su proyecto filosófico. En el presente trabajo, nos proponemos atender ese campo estudiando en qué sentido el mecanismo especie-flujo evoca problemas a los que se había enfrentado Hume al reflexionar sobre la naturaleza y el origen de la noción de ley causal. Esto nos permitirá discutir el papel que Hume procuró asignarle a la“experiencia” y a la “razón” en la elaboración del conocimiento en general y de los fenómenos económicos en particular.

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Biografía del autor/a

Ariadna Cazenave

CEPLAD, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Citas

Tatsuya Sakamoto, “Hume’s Economic Theory”. In A Companion to Hume, ed. by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2008), 374.

David Hume, “My Own Life”. In Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed. by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), xxxiv.

Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 612.

Charles Loic, “French ‘New Politics’ and the Dissemination of David Hume’s Political Discourses on the Continent”. In David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. by Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), 181.

They were republished more than seventeen times in five languages in the next fifteen years, Loic, 181. In this regard, Steuart says in 1767: “Mr. Hume has extended the theory and diversified it prettily in his political discourses; which have done much honour to that gentleman, and drawn the approbation of the learned world so much, that there is hardly a nation in Europe which has not the pleasure of reading them in its own language”, as cited in Rebeca Gomez Betancourt and Matari Pierre Manigat, “James Steuart and the Making of Karl Marx’s Monetary Thought”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25, no. 5 (September 3, 2018): 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/09672567.2018.1482938.

Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas, eds., David Hume’s Political Economy (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), 1.

Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (London/New York: Routledge, 1991), 121.

Robert W. McGee, “The Economic Thought of David Hume”, Hume Studies 15, no. 1 (1989): 184; Eugene F. Miller, “Foreword”. In Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), xvi.

Eugene Rotwein, “Introduction”. In Writings in Economics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), xci; Wennerlind and Schabas, David Hume’s Political Economy, 1.

Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 60.

Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka, The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Londres: Routledge, 2005), 2.

Rotwein, “Introduction”, xci.

“There still prevails, even in nations well acquainted with commerce, a strong jealously with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them. This seems to me almost in every case a groundless apprehension (…) and as it can never be refuted by a particular detail of all the exports, which counterbalance the imports, it may here be proper to form a general argument, that may prove the impossibility of this event”. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 309, 311.

Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 311.

Ibid., 312.

Ernesto Screpanti and Stefano Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, 2nd ed. rev. and expanded (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40.

Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, 4th ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 13.

Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 312–13. ‘‘Wherever I speak of the level of money, I mean always its proportional level to the commodities, labour, industry, and skill, which is in the several states. And I assert, that where these advantages are double, triple, quadruple, to what they are in the neighbouring states, the money infallibly will also be double, triple, and quadruple’’. Ibid., 315.

David Hume, Writings on Economics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 189.

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Schabas, The natural origins of economics, 2-3.

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Margaret Schabas, “Temporal Dimensions in Hume’s Monetary Theory”. In David Hume’s Political Economy, Routledge Studies in the History of Economics (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), 131.

As cited in Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy. Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (Inglaterra: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 239–40. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation exerted a huge influence on the Enlightenment. It contributed to the idea of a self-regulated universe, of a “natural order” governed by mechanical laws. This conception played a key role in the birth of political economy, as the conviction that trade relations were regulated by objective mechanical laws gained ground. Sergio Cremaschi, “Newtonian Physics, Experimental Moral Philosophy and the Shaping of Political Economy”. In Open Economics: Economics in Relation to Other Disciplines, Routledge Studies in the History of Economics 100 (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 75–76; Screpanti and Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, 66.

Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science, 125–26.

“None of the fundamental concepts of natural science can be pointed out as parts of sensuous perceptions, and thus verified by an immediately corresponding impression. It has become increasingly evident that, the more scientific thought extends its dominion, the more it is forced to intellectual conceptions that possess no analogues in the field of concrete sensations”. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), 227–28.

Schabas and Wennerlind, “Retrospectives,” 219.

Margaret Schabas, “Temporal Dimensions in Hume’s Monetary Theory”, in David Hume’s Political Economy, Routledge Studies in the History of Economics (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), 138. Filippo Cesarano, “Hume’s Specie-Flow Mechanism and Classical Monetary Theory: An Alternative Interpretation”, Journal of International Economics 45, no. 1 (1998): 182.

Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics, 67.

Screpanti and Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, 42. “I recall having– usefully from the point of view of clarity–often had recourse in talking about such things to a comparison with fluid bodies, for it seemed to me that the prices of goods in the world find a level among themselves through trade not diversely from the way stagnant waters do that – whatever agitation they suffer – in the end level out and are flat; and the sea itself cannot have its waves higher in the Adriatic than in the Tyrrhenian, or in the Black Sea or the Ocean itself, if not when its disrupted currents or the movements of its ebb and flow and the various situations of its depths bring on a variation of a few feet on some remote strand (Archimedes, De incidentibus in fluido), so that its waters, no less than merchandise, have their perpetual communication over all the universe, so that their own weight obliges them to level out at equal distance from the centre to which they tend”. Montanari, as cited in Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy. Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, 140.

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Screpanti and Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, 38.

Schabas and Wennerlind, “Retrospectives,” 218.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, RH Campbell and AS Skinner, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 22.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition, Reprint, Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume, general eds. of the philosophical works Tom L. Beauchamp, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 24.

Ibid.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid.

Ibid. 29. “It is only after a long course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event. Now where is that process of reasoning, which, from one instance, draws a conclusion, so different from that which it infers from a hundred instances, that are nowise different from that single one? … I cannot find, I cannot imagine any such reasoning”. Ibid., 32.

“Experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connection, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable”. Ibid., 53.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 37–38.

Ibid., 59.

Ernst Cassirer, El problema del conocimiento en la filosofía y en la ciencia modernas IV: de la muerte de Hegel a nuestros días (183 -1932), 5.a reimpr. (México, D. F: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 79.

Gonzalo Carrión, “Imaginación y Acción Humana”. In David Hume and Adam Smith, Supuestos gnoseológico-antropológicos en la configuración de la ciencia económica moderna (Santa Fe: Universidad Católica de Santa Fe, 2015), 114.

Jorge M. Streb, “Hume: The Power of Abduction and Simple Observation in Economics”, CEMA, Documentos de trabajo, n.o 417 (2010): 10.

John W. Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason: Recovering the Human Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 3; Pilar Piqué, “La obra de Adam Smith en el estudio y en la enseñanza de la historia del pensamiento económico” (PhD Thesis, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, 2017), 33; Deborah A. Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Classical Economists (Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 2003), 103.