David Hume on the Origin of Government: A Restatement
Résumé
The purpose of this paper 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 paper 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.

