A dispute · spans 3 eras
Nature vs. Society
Are humans naturally good and corrupted by society, or naturally brutal and saved by it?
Hobbes: in the state of nature life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" — society is what makes life bearable. Rousseau: humans in nature are decent and free — society is what corrupts them. The dispute organizes modern political philosophy. Locke takes a middle path; Marx says the question itself is malformed because "human nature" is itself historical; Beauvoir applies the same insight to gender. The deeper question is whether there is any "natural" baseline at all.
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