Mancur Olson's "Logic of Collective Action" Encapsulated in Two Concise Sentences Written 200 Years Earlier

Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action (Harvard 1965) is rightly celebrated as one of the most important works of political-economy in the past century. Among other things, it is a foundation stone of public choice theory. But did you know that the main thesis of Olson's 170-page book was expressed in just two sentences written 200 years earlier?

Here's David Hume, from the Treatise on Human Nature [1739-40], Book 3, Part 2, Sec. 7, p. 538 (1978):

Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because ‘tis easy for them to know each other's mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is, the abandoning the whole project. But ‘tis very difficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons shou'd agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and wou'd lay the whole burden on others.

Of course, what Hume doesn't provide and Olson does is a clear implication of the potential of minoritarian bias in political processes to rival, or even exceed, the problem of majoritarian bias which was pretty much the sole concern of political theorists of democratic republicanism prior to the second half of the twentieth century.