Custom and Convention

Herodotus assembles his History from the customs, rites, and institutions of peoples scattered from the Greek islands to the Nile to the steppes north of the Black Sea. His method is to travel, to listen, and to record whatever is reported as a local practice, whether in burial, diet, marriage, dress, or worship. The famous passage in Book III on Darius and the Callatiae, in which one people burns its dead while the other eats them, with each horrified at the suggestion of exchange, illustrates the principle he takes from his inquiries. Every people treats its own customs as natural and the customs of others as monstrous. Quoting Pindar with evident approval, he calls custom the king of all. The remark does not settle whether custom is to be praised or blamed. It registers, rather, the force that habitual practice exerts on what men are willing to do or even imagine.

Beneath the cataloguing of diversity there is a quieter thesis about knowledge. Herodotus does not pronounce upon which customs are good and which bad, and he often records contrary accounts of the same event without choosing between them. The variety of human belief and practice is so great, and the sources of testimony so partial, that suspended judgment seems to him the wiser posture. Yet he also insists on preserving marvels and pieties, for if every people thinks its own customs best, the comparative record itself becomes a check on the confidence of any one people in its own way of life. The reader who travels with him through Persia, Egypt, Scythia, and Greece is given something like an education in hesitation, a training in the willingness to entertain without endorsing.

Later thinkers recognize Herodotus as the first systematic observer of custom's variety. The Greek sophists, whom Plato criticizes in the Gorgias and the Theaetetus, press the observation into a general skepticism about natural justice. Montaigne, writing in a very different climate nearly two millennia later, traverses the same ground by reading rather than travel, and reaches conclusions about the limits of reason that belong to the same family of judgments. The great line of ethnographic comparison that runs from Herodotus through Montaigne into the modern anthropologists Freud cites has its headwaters in this first collection of what was done in other places and earlier times.

Herodotus does not offer a theory of custom so much as a permanent invitation to ethnographic comparison. The subsequent chapters on OPINION and KNOWLEDGE consider how far such comparison can be pressed without collapsing into the sophistical relativism that Plato and Aristotle would resist.

The debate between nature and convention is already old by the time Plato takes it up in the Gorgias and the Republic, and he approaches it through the question of the soul. The Sophists, especially Protagoras and Gorgias's circle, had argued that justice and morality are matters of local agreement, varying from city to city the way table manners or burial rites do. Callicles, in the Gorgias, argues further that convention is a device by which the weak constrain the strong, and that nature teaches that the powerful should dominate. Socrates maintains, against this position, that justice is not a human invention but something discoverable by reason.

In the Republic, Glaucon restates the conventionalist position with force. People are just, he argues, only because they lack the power to be unjust. Justice is a compromise, a social contract born of weakness. Plato answers by constructing his ideal city and its parallel in the soul, arguing that justice is the health of both. Convention cannot explain the difference between a well-ordered and a disordered life; only an appeal to the nature of the soul can do that.

Plato does not deny that customs vary. He is well aware that Greek cities differed enormously in their laws. His point is that this variation does not prove that justice is merely conventional. A sick person in Athens and a sick person in Sparta are both sick, regardless of local medical practices. In the same way, an unjust soul is disordered whether or not the surrounding customs happen to approve its behavior.

Plato's insistence that nature provides a standard against which customs can be measured underlies the natural law tradition as it develops in Aristotle, Aquinas, and their successors. Whether any defense of convention can account for the difference between a good and a corrupt way of life without appealing to some such standard is a question the chapters on JUSTICE and NATURE address more fully.

Aristotle accepts Plato's claim that justice is natural, but he qualifies it in a way that gives convention its due. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguishes between natural justice, which has the same force everywhere, and legal justice, which is determined by the laws and customs of particular communities. The direction traffic flows, the form of religious sacrifice, the details of contract law: these are matters of convention. But the broad principles of justice, the prohibition of murder, the requirement of fairness in exchange, hold by nature.

The key to Aristotle's position is that natural justice is not a rigid code. It is, he says, "changeable," not because nature itself changes, but because human circumstances vary. Fire burns the same in Persia and in Greece, but the best political arrangements for a commercial city may differ from those suited to a pastoral one. Convention fills in the details that nature leaves open. This makes local custom neither arbitrary nor sacred; it is the practical working-out of principles that nature provides but does not fully specify.

In the Politics, Aristotle reinforces this view by arguing that the city exists by nature. Human beings are political animals, not because they choose to form societies (as the conventionalists would have it), but because their nature requires communal life for its completion. The conventions that govern any particular city are therefore best understood as attempts, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to realize natural human ends under local conditions.

Aristotle's synthesis avoids both the Sophists' relativism and the rigidity of a purely rationalist ethics, but it leaves a question that Montaigne and Hobbes will press: if nature underdetermines the details of convention, and convention varies enormously across peoples, by what standard can we call any particular custom a successful working-out of natural principles rather than mere habit dressed up in the language of nature?

In the Confessions, Augustine recalls his own confusion as a young man, troubled by the fact that practices condemned in one society were celebrated in another. The Manicheans had exploited this diversity to argue that morality was incoherent. Augustine's answer is to distinguish sharply between human convention and divine law. Customs are the product of time, place, and human will; God's law is eternal and everywhere the same.

This distinction allows Augustine to acknowledge the variety of customs without falling into relativism. Different peoples may rightly adopt different practices in matters that divine law leaves open: styles of dress, forms of greeting, methods of agriculture. But where divine law speaks, no custom can override it. A society that practices human sacrifice or sexual exploitation is not merely "different" from one that does not; it is in rebellion against the created order. The fact that a custom is old and widely followed does not make it good.

Augustine is also attentive to the way custom becomes a kind of second nature. Long habit can make even vicious practices feel natural, so that those raised in them cannot imagine life otherwise. This is why conversion, for Augustine, requires a break with custom, a wrenching of the will away from the habitual and toward the eternal. Education and upbringing transmit customs, but Augustine holds that grace alone can redirect the will away from habits that have become deeply entrenched.

Augustine brings to the debate over custom and convention a theological dimension that the Greek philosophers had not raised. For the medieval tradition that follows, the question becomes not simply whether justice is natural or conventional, but whether human customs conform to or defy the divine order.

Aquinas takes up custom at the point where positive law meets the habitual practice of a community. Following a line that runs from Aristotle through the Roman jurists and Augustine, he holds that the natural law has its source in the rational nature of the creature, and that human laws are legitimate insofar as they determine the indeterminate precepts of that law for the circumstances of a particular people. Between the natural law and its enacted determinations, custom occupies a curious middle place. It is not legislated by any prince. It grows by the accumulated practice of a people. Yet it binds. The habitual conduct of a community, in Aquinas's phrase, declares the will and reason that would otherwise be expressed in statute, and the law of a people therefore includes both what is written in its codes and what is embodied in its manners.

The Summa Theologica treats the question directly. Custom, Aquinas writes, has the force of a law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of law. Each clause registers a distinct claim. A practice long observed by the community can acquire the binding force of statute, because the continued external action by which a people conducts its life makes manifest what would otherwise be expressed in legislation. A statute no longer observed may cease to bind, because law that lacks the consent of practice is a dead letter. Where the letter of the law is unclear, the habitual interpretation of the community supplies its meaning. In all three cases, the authority of custom rests on the rational will of the people as expressed through their conduct, not on mere antiquity or prescriptive right.

This analysis preserves Aristotle's insight that natural justice is in part determinable by local circumstance, without surrendering the claim that some things are everywhere and always unjust. A custom contrary to the natural law, like a statute contrary to the natural law, is no true law. It retains whatever coercive force the community chooses to give it, but it cannot oblige in conscience. A custom that determines the natural law to a local form, as in the particular penalties for theft or the particular forms of contract, genuinely participates in the rational order it expresses. Aquinas thereby places custom within the economy of reason rather than outside it, and refuses the sophistical alternative that would reduce all moral order to mere agreement among men.

The tradition inherits from Aquinas a vocabulary in which custom is neither a mere accident of history nor a rival to reason, but one of the modes through which the reason of a community takes on public form. Later treatments of positive law, whether by Hobbes, who sharpens the contrast between covenant and habit, or by Hegel, who widens habit into the substantial ethical life of a people, engage this synthesis either to extend it or to dismantle it. The chapters on LAW and HABIT pursue the question further.

Montaigne writes in the wake of the European encounter with the New World, and the variety of human customs provides him with a means of questioning confident appeals to nature or reason. In "Of Custom," he catalogs an astonishing range of practices: peoples who eat their dead, who greet strangers with violence, who consider modesty a vice. His purpose is not mere curiosity. He wants to show that custom exercises a tyranny over the mind so complete that people mistake their local habits for the dictates of nature or reason. We call "barbarous" whatever does not resemble our own practice, never noticing that our own customs would appear equally strange to others.

In "Of Cannibals," Montaigne sharpens the point by comparing Brazilian cannibalism with European warfare. The cannibals at least eat the dead; Europeans torture the living. Which practice is more "barbarous"? The question is designed to unsettle every confident appeal to civilized custom. Montaigne does not conclude that all customs are equally good. He concludes, rather, that reason is too weak an instrument to sort them reliably. We are creatures of habit far more than creatures of reason, and the wise person recognizes this.

Montaigne's skepticism does not lead to nihilism. He recommends following the customs of one's own country, not because they are rationally justified, but because stability and social peace are real goods. Reform is dangerous, he warns, because custom holds society together in ways that reformers rarely understand. The fabric of social life is woven from habits, and pulling one thread may unravel the whole.

Montaigne's catalog of human diversity raises a question the Enlightenment will address: if reason is too weak to sort good customs from bad, what grounds the reformer's confidence that her proposals are improvements and not merely different habits? Hume will embrace much of this skepticism. Rousseau's response, in the Discourse on Inequality, is to argue that a standard can be found in the natural state of man prior to civilization; whether this claim escapes Montaigne's critique is considered more fully in the chapters on NATURE and PROGRESS.

Hobbes carries the conventionalist position to its most thoroughgoing conclusion. In the state of nature, before any agreement or sovereign authority, there is no justice and no injustice, no property and no law. These are all artifacts of convention, created when individuals covenant together and submit to a common power. "Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice." Nature provides only the war of all against all; everything else is human construction.

This is not, for Hobbes, a lament. Convention is the great achievement of human reason. The laws of nature that Hobbes describes (seek peace, keep covenants, be equitable) are rational maxims that any thinking person can discover, but they have no binding force until a sovereign enforces them. Custom, in the sense of habitual practice, may support the sovereign's authority, but it can also undermine it. Hobbes is deeply suspicious of traditions and precedents that compete with the sovereign's commands. Old customs have no authority simply because they are old.

Hobbes also rejects the Aristotelian idea that human beings are political by nature. The city is not a natural growth but a deliberate construction, an "artificial man" assembled from the decisions of individuals who find the state of nature intolerable. Every institution, every law, every moral rule is traceable to human will and agreement. The appeal to nature or divine law is, for Hobbes, either confused or a mask for ambition.

Hume inherits Hobbes's skepticism about natural law while modifying his account of sovereignty. Rousseau accepts the view that society is conventional but draws a different conclusion, arguing that the conventions of civilization corrupt rather than preserve mankind. The theory of the social contract, as it develops in these and later writers, takes its point of departure from Hobbes's insistence that all legitimate authority rests on agreement rather than nature.

Hume makes custom a central explanatory principle in both epistemology and moral theory. In the Treatise and the Enquiry, he argues that our most fundamental beliefs, including our confidence that the future will resemble the past, rest not on rational demonstration but on habit. We expect the sun to rise tomorrow because it has always risen, not because we can prove it must. "Custom, then, is the great guide of human life." Without it, we could not reason, could not act, could not survive.

This account transforms the old debate between nature and convention. For Hume, the question is not whether human practices are "natural" or "conventional" in the Greek sense, because the distinction itself is unstable. Custom is natural to human beings; it is the mechanism by which experience becomes expectation. Moral sentiments, too, are the product of habit and social training. We approve of justice not because we perceive its eternal rightness but because social life has conditioned us to feel approval when we see it practiced and disapproval when we see it violated.

Hume does not conclude that moral judgments are arbitrary. Customs arise from human nature, from our capacity for sympathy, our need for cooperation, our sensitivity to pleasure and pain. They are, in that sense, grounded in something real. But they are not grounded in the way that Plato or Aquinas supposed, in eternal forms or divine commands. They are grounded in the regularities of human psychology, which are themselves contingent facts about the kind of creatures we happen to be.

Hume dissolves the old opposition between nature and convention by showing that what we call "natural" responses are themselves the product of long habit. The question his account leaves open is how to distinguish custom worth preserving from custom worth rejecting, a question Mill addresses by arguing that some habits develop the individual faculties while others suppress them. Whether this distinction can be maintained on Hume's own principles is a problem the chapter on LIBERTY examines more fully.

Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that social order is conventional, but he reverses the evaluation. Where Hobbes saw convention as the rescue of humanity from natural misery, Rousseau sees it as the source of misery. In the Discourse on Inequality, he argues that natural man was solitary, free, and content. It was the development of social conventions, property, language, rank, that introduced envy, dependence, and exploitation. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The chains are forged from convention.

Rousseau's state of nature is not Hobbes's war of all against all. It is a condition of peaceful independence, in which each person satisfies simple needs without comparing himself to others. The moment someone fences off a plot of land and says "this is mine," convention begins its corrupting work. From property comes inequality; from inequality, domination; from domination, the elaborate customs that teach the poor to accept their condition as natural. The customs of civilized society are, for Rousseau, a vast system of disguised coercion.

This does not mean Rousseau wants to return to the forest. His purpose is diagnostic, not nostalgic. By showing that inequality is conventional rather than natural, he opens the possibility of creating better conventions. The Social Contract, his constructive work, proposes a form of political association in which convention serves freedom rather than destroying it. The general will, expressed through legitimate law, can reconcile the individual's natural liberty with the demands of communal life.

Rousseau's argument that social institutions create rather than reflect inequality, and that convention is a source of human misery rather than a remedy for it, recurs in later writers who question the justice of existing social arrangements. Its bearing on the questions treated in the chapters on EQUALITY and LIBERTY is considered more fully there.

Hegel takes up the question of custom at the point where it had been most sharply posed against nature and reason. The Enlightenment had tended to treat the habits of a people as either local accidents to be tolerated or obstacles to be cleared away in the name of reason. Hegel finds this dichotomy impoverished. Custom, for him, is the medium in which the ethical life of a community actually exists. He uses the word Sittlichkeit, which carries in German the double suggestion of moral and customary, to name this sphere. Standard translations as "ethical life" or "ethical substance" convey part of the meaning, but the rootedness of the concept in Sitte, meaning custom, is essential to the purpose of the Philosophy of Right.

That work distinguishes Sittlichkeit from Moralitat, the inward morality of conscience that Kant had made the centerpiece of ethics. Kantian morality, Hegel argues, remains abstract and empty so long as it stays within the individual's subjective willing. It becomes concrete only when embodied in institutions, of which Hegel names three: the family, civil society, and the state. These institutions do not stand over against the moral agent as external constraints. They are the forms in which a free will finds itself at home, insofar as the customs of a people, when they are rational, express the kind of life its members recognize as their own. A member of a well-ordered community wills the customary because the customary, in such a case, is the objective shape of his own freedom, and the abstract opposition between nature and convention is overcome in a concrete ethical world.

This position does not amount to approval of every custom as it happens to stand. Hegel insists that the rationality of a people's ethical life must be actually won, and he reads the movement of world history as in part the progressive clarification of the conditions under which custom can be rational. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History he traces this development through Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic civilizations, each of which realizes a further moment of freedom's self-recognition within the customary. The sophistical suggestion that custom is the enemy of reason, and its Enlightenment restatement in the call to clear the ground of mere habit, are thereby displaced. Custom becomes the field in which reason attains concrete existence, and the old opposition between the rational and the conventional is drawn into a more capacious account of how a free life is actually lived.

The subsequent tradition divides over Hegel's rehabilitation of custom. Mill, in On Liberty, reads the weight of the customary as a hindrance to individuality and a standing threat to progress. Marx inherits the historical method but rejects the claim that modern ethical life has achieved the rationality Hegel credited to it. Freud, from a different angle, restates the ancient suspicion that the price of custom is the repression of instinct. The chapters on STATE, HABIT, and LIBERTY pursue these disputes further.

Mill takes up the problem of custom from the standpoint of individual freedom. In Chapter III of On Liberty, he identifies custom as the chief obstacle to human development. People follow the practices of their neighbors, their class, their nation, not because they have examined those practices and found them good, but because they have never thought to question them. "The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement." This despotism operates without a despot; it is the silent pressure of collective habit on the individual mind.

Mill does not deny that customs often embody accumulated wisdom. A practice that has survived for generations may well encode useful knowledge. But he insists that customs lose their value when they are followed mechanically, without understanding or reflection. A person who acts from custom alone exercises no choice and develops no character. The human faculties of perception, judgment, and moral preference are like muscles: they grow strong through use and atrophy through neglect. A society in which everyone follows custom without thinking is a society of stunted human beings.

The remedy is individuality, the willingness to experiment with different ways of living and to tolerate such experiments in others. Mill argues that eccentricity is itself a social good, because it breaks the tyranny of the customary and opens space for new possibilities. Conformity produces stagnation; diversity of practice produces progress. The great ages of human achievement have always been ages in which custom loosened its grip and individuals were free to follow their own judgment.

Mill's critique of the despotism of custom is the fullest statement, among the thinkers represented here, of the case for individuality against convention. His argument that human progress depends on the freedom to deviate from established practice is taken up more fully in the chapters on LIBERTY and PROGRESS.

Freud recasts the old debate in psychological terms. For him, custom and convention are not merely social arrangements but psychic structures, internalized through childhood as the superego. Civilization demands that individuals renounce their most powerful instincts, especially aggression and sexuality, and channel them into socially acceptable forms. The customs of any society are, at bottom, a system of organized repression. They exist because unchecked instinct would make communal life impossible.

This account echoes Hobbes: without the constraints of convention, human life would be violent and chaotic. But Freud adds a dimension Hobbes did not foresee. The renunciation of instinct exacts a psychological cost. Repressed drives do not disappear; they return as guilt, neurosis, and a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction. "Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security." The customs that hold society together also make individuals miserable. Every prohibition, every rule of politeness, every moral commandment contributes to the reservoir of frustrated desire that Freud calls the unconscious.

Freud is not, like Rousseau, calling for a return to nature. He regards that option as both impossible and undesirable. But he is equally far from Mill's optimism about individuality. The conflict between instinct and convention is, for Freud, permanent and irresolvable. No amount of reform can eliminate the fundamental tension between what human beings want and what social life requires. Custom is both necessary and oppressive, and the best we can hope for is a clear-eyed recognition of the bargain civilization demands.

Freud's account of civilization and its discontents turns the question of custom inward. The question becomes not only whether customs are natural or conventional, just or unjust, but what psychological cost any system of rules exacts from those who live under it. The bearing of this analysis on the questions treated in the chapters on EMOTION and PLEASURE AND PAIN is considered more fully there.