Hobbes and Rousseau Are Both Mistaken: Cooperation as Both Nature and Burden
Some philosophical disputes survive their refutation because they continue, nonetheless, to shape our intellectual vocabulary. The one opposing Hobbes and Rousseau, regarding the original nature of humanity, belongs to this peculiar category. Any reasonably educated reader knows, or believes they know, that a choice must be made: either the war of all against all tempered by the social contract, or original goodness corrupted by property. And we see this debate resurface, almost mechanically, with every collective tragedy. A war breaks out, a genocide is revealed, an unexpected act of cruelty emerges, and we find ourselves returning to one side or the other in search of confirmation of our intuitions. Yet this routine must be abandoned. Three quarters of a century of primatology, evolutionary anthropology, and developmental psychology have rendered the debate obsolete, not by identifying a winner, but by revealing that the question itself was poorly framed. The defensible answer, and i...