  In both the Treatise and “Of the Original Contract,” Hume rejects a Hobbesian conception of government as arising from the state of nature through a social contract. Hume offers various criticisms, but a particularly fundamental objection is that Hobbes adopts a misguided order of explanation. Hobbes explains government as the result of phenomena, such as promising or contracting, that themselves rest upon convention and hence could not arise in a pure state of nature. Hume contends that promising and government arise independently, albeit in the same basic way and from the same basic source:  convention.[6]