David Hume on the Origin of Government: A Restatement

André Lapidus () and Ecem Okan ()
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André Lapidus: PHARE, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
Ecem Okan: IDEA, University of Lorraine

A chapter in 40 Years of Economics, 2025, pp 379-395 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract [aut]Hume, David[aut]Hume, DavidThe purpose of this chapter is to reinvestigate David Hume’s explanation of the origin of government by stressing the existence therein of two distinct accounts of how government emerges: (i) a decisional account which presents the instauration of government as an institutional constraint voluntarily adopted against people’s failure to cope with difficulties related to decision in time, (ii) an historical account depicting how allegiance as a practice acquired during wartime in primitive societies paved the way for the establishment of civil government. This chapter thus complements, on the one hand, the secondary literature (Mackie 1980, Baier 1991, Cohon 2008) which, though drawing generally upon prior literature on the determination of action in time, seems to have overlooked the subtle difference between impatience and time-inconsistency in Hume’s decisional account of the origin of government. On the other hand, it qualifies a line of interpretation (Stewart 1963, Forbes 1975, Waszek 1988, Haakonssen 1994, 2009) which argues that Hume, by giving a truly historical account in his posthumous essay “Of the Origin of Government” (Hume 1777), had changed his explanation of the origin of government originally given in the Treatise of Human Nature (Hume 1739–40, 3.2.7). We show that, while the historical explanation was already present in the Treatise, the decisional one, based on the acceptability of the rules of justice, gives an account of how civil government emerges succeeding the primitive form of government.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-93401-8_23

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