As Hume (1978 [1739–40], 3.2.8, 546) says of contracts, if they “had only their own proper obligation, without the separate sanction of government, they wou’d have but little efficacy in [all large and civilized] societies. This separates the boundaries of our public and private duties, and shews that the latter are more dependant on the former, than the former on the latter.” Hobbes may have exaggerated the extent to which powerful institutional sanctions are required for grounding trust and promises, but he was not radically mistaken.

XREF: Connects to contract theory debates in political philosophy — echoes the Hobbes-Hume line on the institutional grounding of promises and trust. QUESTION: Worth probing how far private obligations really rely on state enforcement versus social norms operating without institutional sanctions.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 834