Writing in the mid-17th century, a period of violent constitutional turmoil in Britain, Thomas Hobbes painted a famously bleak picture of human life and human nature. In Leviathan, his great political treatise, Hobbes saw human beings as prone to conflict because of competition, mutual fear, and the wish for personal glory. Taken together, he concluded, these lead us to pre-emptive, or simply aggressive, violence. Thus, we’re naturally inclined to be enemies. Without some guaranteed method of securing peace, we’ll be caught up in a war of all against all, leading lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
To be clear, Leviathan does not accuse us of being inherently malevolent or aggressive, but it identifies no element within human nature of altruistic or sympathetic feelings, at least beyond the…