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 it is an uncomfortable one, can be summarized in a simple formula: what is natural in us is cooperation, and cooperation is, in its very essence, morally dual.

Where Rousseau Is Partly Right

On one specific point, and only one, Rousseau is closer to the truth than Hobbes. Humans are an ultra-social species, whose decisive selective advantage lies in large-scale cooperation, and whose cooperative dispositions appear from the earliest months of life.

The work of Michael Tomasello on shared intentionality, that seemingly unique ability to represent a common goal with others; the studies by Felix Warneken and Tomasello on spontaneous altruism in very young children, who hurry to help adults in difficulty even before they can speak; the entire body of work by Frans de Waal on empathy, reconciliation, and consolation behaviors in our primate relatives: all converge. The Hobbesian picture of a bellum omnium contra omnes as the natural state does not withstand scrutiny. There likely never existed humans living against one another in generalized distrust. Our ancestors lived in cooperative groups, and it is this dense, immemorial sociality that constitutes their true evolutionary signature.

On this terrain, Rousseau was therefore right, for reasons he himself did not fully grasp: he intuited what contemporary science has since uncovered.

Where Rousseau’s Thesis Collapses, and Hobbes Regains Plausibility

But on a second, decisive point, the Genevan philosopher collapses. He imagined an original human, solitary, wandering, self-sufficient, who would have entered society only accidentally, almost reluctantly, and always later. This construction collapses in light of all available evidence. Contemporary science simply knows of no pre-social stage of humanity. Sociality predates humanity itself: we inherited it from great apes, and from an even older lineage of primates for whom gregariousness is a structural trait, not a contingent event.

In other words, there was never a “transition” to society, for the simple reason that our ancestors were never outside it. The pre-civil state as an individualized original condition remains a philosophical fiction, and the myth of the solitary noble savage is a romantic projection onto a humanity that never existed. On this specific point, Hobbes is less mistaken than his opponent: society is not an institution that had to be founded against nature; it is the very condition for the emergence of the human.

The Real Debate Lies in Violence

What truly concerned both philosophers, however, is violence. This is where the real scientific debate still lies today, and where caution is required, because three findings must be considered together; taken in isolation, each leads to misunderstanding.

The self-domestication hypothesis, defended by Richard Wrangham in The Goodness Paradox (2019), first argues that Homo sapiens has been selected against reactive aggression, the kind that erupts impulsively in response to immediate provocation. This is what makes us, statistically, more peaceful in everyday life than most of our primate relatives. We routinely pass hundreds of strangers each day in our cities without incident, a form of restraint a chimpanzee would be incapable of.

At the same time, Wrangham argues that this process may have selected for, or at least preserved, proactive, planned, coalition-based aggression. We would therefore be both less prone to spontaneous individual violence and more capable of organized collective violence. The hypothesis is plausible and well supported, but it is not universally accepted, and intellectual honesty requires presenting it as such.

The archaeology of warfare further complicates the picture. The work of Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, published in Science in 2013, established that in mobile hunter-gatherer societies, most violent deaths stemmed from interpersonal conflicts rather than organized warfare. War as an institution, with clearly defined sides, raids, and extermination logic, appears correlated with sedentarization, stock accumulation, and the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic. In this more cautious form, Rousseau’s intuition of a corruption through social history regains a certain relevance, without for all that proving any original human goodness.

What Neither Could See

The decisive lesson, which goes beyond both philosophers and probably constitutes the deepest point of agreement in contemporary sciences, is this: what defines the human is neither war nor goodness, but an unparalleled capacity for large-scale cooperation. And it is precisely this capacity that simultaneously produces civilization and its most extreme forms of violence.

This is the finding that should unsettle anyone who seriously reflects on human nature. Genocides are ultra-cooperative acts. Auschwitz was not the work of lone wolves reverting to a state of nature, but of a modern administration, a precise logistical system, engineers, bureaucrats, railway workers, and doctors coordinated on a continental scale. Industrial warfare follows the same logic. The sociality that makes possible child-rearing, medicine, and law also makes possible the systematic and large-scale destruction of human beings.

Hobbes and Rousseau share an erroneous assumption that they could not have identified, lacking the conceptual tools to do so: they take for granted that one must choose between a good nature and a bad nature. Contemporary sciences say otherwise. The question is ill-posed because what is natural in us is cooperation, and cooperation, in itself, does not lean in any moral direction. It is the means by which both collective good and collective evil become possible on scales the individual alone could never achieve.

A Necessary Epistemic Caution

A final clarification is necessary, not as a concession but as a requirement. None of the results invoked here are definitively settled. Wrangham’s hypothesis remains vigorously debated. The debate between Pinker and Fry on prehistoric violence is more active than ever. Estimates of violent mortality in pre-state societies are regularly revised in both directions. Comparisons with bonobos and chimpanzees illuminate but are not sufficient to fully reconstruct our evolutionary past.

We must therefore not conclude that the sciences have reached a definitive answer, but rather that there is partial convergence: robust enough to disqualify both philosophers, yet still insufficient to replace their theories with a definitive formula.

What Remains to Be Thought

What remains, then, is a task that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauian: to think of cooperation as a morally neutral faculty, whose quality ultimately depends on social structures, institutions, and collective narratives that shape it. Such a reformulation disqualifies two symmetrical intellectual gestures.

The first, that of anthropological pessimists, holds that nothing can be expected from a humanity assumed to be bad by nature. This is an error: our nature is not war. The second, that of naïve optimists, believes that merely removing corrupting institutions would restore an original goodness. This too is an error: the worst forms of violence are not regressions to a state of nature, but rather the culmination of our cooperative power.

To recognize that we are an ultra-cooperative species whose cooperation remains inherently ambivalent is to admit that salvation lies neither in nature nor in civilization. Institutions are not meant to domesticate a wild beast slumbering within us, nor to protect an original goodness corrupted by society. Their more modest and more demanding task is to orient a cooperation that, left to itself, can produce both cathedrals and camps. The lesson is not comforting. It compels.

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References

Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking, Harvard University Press, 2014.

Felix Warneken et Michael Tomasello, « Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees », Science, vol. 311, 2006.

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy. Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, Harmony Books, 2009.

Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox. How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent, Pantheon Books, 2019.

Douglas P. Fry et Patrik Söderberg, « Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War », Science, vol. 341, 2013.

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence Has Declined, Viking, 2011.