The sleepy ready might be forgiven for nodding a bit at the beginning of this excerpt of Hume's essay and taking Hume to be merely voicing assent to the Lockean view of the basis of political authority. However, the point of the essay is to demolish Locke's view. The beginning of the excerpt acknowledges only that in the time before government, there must have been some consent to be governed in order for government to have been created since people are roughly equal in power and one could not easily subdue another.
Hume contends that such original government would have been short-lived and small in scope had its chieftain been able to solidify it by the use of force. The frequent persuasion of force caused an habitual acquiescence to his rule and became no longer necessary. In fact there is no actual case of government by consent in the Lockean sense, Hume points out. Authority is instead based on particular cultural conditions everywhere we look and never based on the consent of the governed. A lengthy history and the habits resulting from it (i.e., the tradition and culture) produce this authority and the reverence for it and also conceal from us a more distant past of forced subjection resulting itself from the exigencies of inter-tribal warfare and the power of a general over his soldiers which lasts even after military victory. Consent is a chimera which cannot be reconciled with actual historical knowledge.
Furthermore, if some original contract were the basis for authority, this would assume that the consent of ancestors could obligate descendants, which is certainly objectionable to "republican writers." Moreover, elections are not only rare but always by the suffrage of a tiny few, which shouldn't obligate all members of society on the republican view. These wise electors choose leaders who can keep order and master a people who need one but are not wise enough to choose the right one. Again, the man on the street will say that the authority of his revered prince has nothing to do with whether he consents to it or not but rather that he consents to it because it is authority. There isn't even tacit consent in the obedience we observe in actual societies. Finally, the duty of allegiance to political authority is based on the apprehension of the utility of an orderly society, rather than consent. (This is a rule-utilitarian calculus where a person sees that if everybody disobeyed the chief, conditions would be intolerable.)
Hume agrees that consent is "the best and most sacred" basis of government. But he contends that it is hardly ever to be found as the basis of actual observed authority.
Let me propose two Lockean responses to Hume's critique. First, the utility of social order may well be part of the basis for obedience to political authority, but it is also a reason to give consent to be governed. Moreover, the Lockean might contend that the legitimacy of any governmental authority depends upon that government's being of a kind to which an informed and rational subject would consent, namely a just and competent kind. The Lockean consent, then, might be seen as not only tacit but logically implicit in the sense that although few members of a given society consciously recognize that there are sufficient reasons for consenting to the authority of the government, any reasonable and informed member of society should come to this conclusion if he thought it through. Of course there are good qualities of a government which call forth consent to be governed but these qualities constitute authority itself only with the addition of this implicit, tacit consent. Hume is right that history, tradition and culture cover up this logic, but perhaps it is nevertheless real.
