About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

33 Const. Pol. Econ. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/constpe33 and id is 1 raw text is: Constitutional Political Economy (2022) 33:1-24 https://doi.org/10.1007/si0602-021-09347-5 ORIGINAL PAPER Convention without convening Erik W. Matson . Daniel B. Klein2 Accepted: 9 August 2021 / Published online: 16 August 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract David K. Lewis published his brilliant PhD dissertation in 1969, Convention; A Philosophical Study. With a lag, scholarship on David Hume has come to elaborate the similitude between Lewis and Hume on convention. Reading Hume along the lines of Lewis gives us a vocabulary with which we can better appreciate and articu- late the innovativeness of Hume's theory of convention. This study contributes to that appreciation and to rearticulates Hume's innovative analytical framework for thinking about the unformalized duties and obligations-sometimes glossed as institutions or culture-underlying social interaction and economic behavior. After summarizing Lewis, we treat Hume's account of the emergence of the conventions of language, justice, and political authority in broadly Lewisian terms. Another pur- pose is to draw on Hume to develop a concept of natural convention. A natural convention is a social practice whose concrete form in time and place is conven- tional in a Lewisian sense, but whose generalized form is necessary, and hence natu- ral, for more advanced social organization. In the final section of the paper, we con- sider the semantic originality of Hume's convention talk. Drawing from a largescale textual search, we find scant evidence that the English word convention was used in a Lewisian sense-that is, in a sense that did not entail a literal convening-prior to Hume. Keywords David Hume - David K. Lewis - Natural convention - Justice - Property JEL codes B12 - B31 - K12 E Erik W. Matson ematson @mercatus.gmu.edu Daniel B. Klein dklein@gmu.edu Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA 2 Department of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA I_) Springer

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most