What is the root of all evil? The Apostle Paul, in one of his letters to Timothy, famously nominated money. Two millennia later, Richard Dawkins said that it was religion itself. Thomas Hobbes went further still: it was not the introduction of money or religion that corrupted us – human nature is the source of our problems. Without a strong sovereign to rule over us, said Hobbes, we’d be at each other’s throats. Life in such a state of nature would be “nasty, brutish and short”.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the , tells a different story. It’s true, he concedes, that things would get rather brutish rather quickly if we were left to our own devices. But then, says Rousseau, we moderns are not very good exemplars of human nature. In fact, what Hobbes calls a state of nature is nothing more than
