58 CRAIG HENDERSON
We see no such cases throughout history beyond this original contract where man
exited the state of nature, where governments have been founded on the voluntary
consent of the people to be ruled. “On the contrary”, Hume (1987: 468)writes, “we
find everywhere Princes who claim their subjects as their property, and assert their
independent right of sovereignty, from conquest or succession”. In such cases, he
argues that the subjects respect these conditions as readily as they accept the laws of
nature, without giving any thought to enquiring as to the origin of these laws. Force
and violence, for Hume (1987: 471) were the common factors behind the rise and fall
of empires, not mutual agreement or voluntary association. In contrast to contract
theorists then, Hume (1987: 471) argues, when we look into the world at previous
records of conquest and the establishment of states, this is the time when the people’s
consent is least consulted. For Hume (1987: 474), “the origin of almost all of the new
ones…and that in a few cases, where consent may seem to have taken place, it was
commonly so irregular, so confined, or so much intermixed either with fraud or
violence, that it cannot have any great authority”. In such times, the citizens of an old
regime are often faced with the choices of consent, die, or flee and in these cases
there is nothing voluntary about the consent given, rather it could be said that these
were cases of blind obedience. Again, as Hume (1987: 474) states, “the original
establishment was formed by violence, and submitted to by necessity. The subsequent
administration is supported by power, and acquiesced in by the people, not as a matter
of choice but by obligation”.
In Hume’s dismissal of the existence of consent between people and their
governments throughout history, it is pertinent to note that this is a clear rejection of
the views of Locke (1947: 191-193), who instead sought to find evidence of this kind
of consent permeating widely in existing states. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in
seeking to find such evidence of consent between people and government, Locke is
forced to stretch the notion of the concept of consent in such a way that it loses its
intrinsic value.
In analysing the notion of consent, Hume is especially dismissive of Locke’s
aforementioned idea of a citizen tacitly consenting to government when that person