Theories of human nature attempt to identify and explain the fundamental features of the human species; and many theorists go on to offer prescriptions as to how human life ought to be conducted, both at the level of individual behaviour, and the level of social and political policy.
There has been intense disagreement about a number of basic issues: whether humans are essentially
different from other animals; whether they differ importantly from each other (individually, or in races or other groups);
whether human nature is constant, or historically and culturally variable; whether human nature is basically good and in need only of appropriate sustenance, or in important respects defective and requiring transformation.
There has, as a result, been much argument about the role of government and politics in sustaining or changing human life. The multiple ambiguity of the term ‘nature’, as used in this whole debate, should be noted straightaway. In asking how far human nature can be changed, we usually mean human dispositions and behaviour as we know them, in the society we presently live in.
But some influential thinkers—notably Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau—have used the phrase ‘human nature’ (or its equivalents) to express their conception of how human beings would behave if there were no society, no state, government or politics, and presumably little or no education or culture. Sometimes the conception is expressed historically, in a claim about how things were before the beginning of government. The contrast has been variously expressed as between the given and the artificial, the natural and the conventional, the biological and the social, the original and the present day.
Another important ambiguity is about whether the supposed natural state of humanity is to be preferred or avoided. In contemporary discourse what is ‘natural’ is often assumed to be good (as in natural yoghurt, natural colours, natural lifestyles);
certainly what is described as ‘unnatural’ is thereby condemned as bad. Hobbes famously presented the pre-social ‘state of nature’ as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and saw the social contract as the only rational way of escape from it. Both he and Locke use the state of nature as a device to illuminate the advantages of political society, and to justify certain relationships of authority. But Rousseau, writing about a century later (against the prevailing optimistic mood of the Enlightenment), argued that society had introduced all sorts of unjust inequalities.
In his early work the state of nature serves as a critique of many of the crucial features of existing society, and it is easy to see how (in the era of the French revolution) his conceptions could be used to support attempts at radical reform. Rousseau has probably been influential in fostering the idea that what is ‘natural’ must therefore be best, but it is a highly contentious assumption.
This essay will provide a brief overview of some of the most politically influential conceptions of human nature, noting how normative views can be concealed within apparently factual theories, and comparing them on the issue of constancy versus changeability. Some theorists have held that human nature could be substantially altered, given sufficiently radical changes in political or economic structures, or in social practices such as infant-rearing, education, or religious observance.
We can call those who offer such remedies ‘social engineers’, in that they hold that human behaviour could be substantially changed for the better, and human beings made happier, if only their recommended social set-up could be instituted. But other theories, whether biological, social or theological, imply that there are strict limits to how far human nature can be affected by variations in social conditions.
The debate here has wide ramifications—into political and social theory, sociology, psychology, biology, philosophy and theology. It is not, however, a lining-up behind simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers as to whether human nature can be changed, for we cannot do justice to the different views by trying to divide them neatly into ‘constantists’ and ‘variabilists’. There is, rather, a great variety of views about how far, and under what conditions, human nature might be changed, and how much it must remain the same. So we may as well review our selected theories in historical order.