This, too, was a view shared by many of the founders. The Scriptures teach that we are both made in the image of God and fallen creatures in the words of Saint Paul, we can be “instruments of wickedness” as well as “instruments of righteousness.” 3 Human beings are capable of acts of squalor and acts of nobility we can pursue vice and we can pursue virtue.Īs for the matter of the state: Romans 13 makes clear that government is divinely sanctioned by God to preserve public order, restrain evil, and make justice possible. This last view of human nature is consistent with and reflective of Christian teaching. It places a premium on thrift, savings, and investment.
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The founders’ assumption was that within every human heart, let alone among different individuals, are competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents.Ī free market can also better our moral condition-not dramatically and not always, but often enough. People were swayed by both reason and passion, capable of self-government but not to be trusted with absolute power. They believed instead that human nature was mixed, a combination of virtue and vice, nobility and corruption. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But Madison and the other founders knew men were not angels and would never become angels. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. The third model of human nature is found in the thinking of the American founders. In the process, we would gain self-preservation, but at the expense of liberty. Hobbes, for example, worried that people were ever in danger of lapsing into a pre-civilized state, “without a common power to keep them all in awe,” which, in turn, would lead to a hopeless existence, a “state of nature” characterized by “a war of every man, against every man.” It was, Hobbes wrote, a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To avoid this fate, one must submit to the authority of the state, what he termed the “Leviathan” (a monstrous, multi-headed sea creature mentioned in the Hebrew Bible). And people were, at their core, antisocial beings. The second current of thought, embodied in the writings of 17th-century Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, viewed human nature as more nearly the opposite: inelastic, brittle, and unalterable. They articulated a theory of human nature and socioeconomic organization that eventually influenced capitalism’s most famous and bitter critic: the German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary Karl Marx. These theorists dreamed of a communal society, liberated from private property and free of human inequality. They considered human nature plastic and malleable, to the point that no fixed human nature existed to speak of architects of a social system could, therefore, mold it into anything they imagined. These theorists-Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon among them-believed that human nature can be as easily reshaped as hot wax. Such notions, espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophes, heavily influenced a later generation of socialist thinkers. Their plans were grandiose, utopian, and revolutionary, aiming at “the universal regeneration of mankind” and the creation of a “New Man.” 1Īdvocates of free enterprise believe that creativity, enterprise, and ingenuity compose essential parts of human nature. The first school included those who (representing the French Enlightenment) believed in man’s perfectibility and the pre-eminence of scientific rationalism. A third view was that although human beings are flawed, we are capable of virtuous acts and self-government-that under the right circumstances, human nature can work to the advantage of the whole. A second was that we are flawed, and fatally so we need to accept and build our society around this unpleasant reality. One model was that humans, while flawed, are perfectible. Three models were particularly significant. They are the foundation stone.ĭuring the 18th century-a period that saw the advent of modern capitalism-there were several different currents of thought about the nature of the human person. The suppositions we begin with-the ways in which that picture is developed-determine the lives we lead, the institutions we build, and the civilizations we create. At the core of every social, political, and economic system is a picture of human nature (to paraphrase 20th-century columnist Walter Lippmann).