What Is the Essence of Man? Hobbes, Rousseau and Freud on Human Nature

Last updated: October 20, 2026

The question of the essence of man asks whether there is something all human beings share by nature, before upbringing, culture and law shape them, and what it is like. Thomas Hobbes answered in Leviathan (1651) that without a common power to keep people in awe, human life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755) shot back that Hobbes had described society, not nature. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), largely sided with Hobbes on aggression but moved the fight into every individual mind.

Three cartoon stills sit under the heading “Human nature according to:”. Under “Hobbes”, a famous yellow cartoon sponge appears as a hunched, feral caveman. Under “Rousseau”, the same sponge stands on the beach, beaming. Under “Freud”, a red cartoon crab is caught in a blurred, panicked whirl of figures. As summaries go, it’s not bad, though the Rousseau panel smiles for the wrong reason.

Hobbes Asks Why You Lock Your Doors

Hobbes argued that human beings without government would live in a war of every man against every man, not because they are monsters but because they are roughly equal, distrustful of each other and hungry for reputation.

Leviathan, chapter 13, starts from a surprising premise: nature has made people so equal in body and mind that even the weakest can kill the strongest, by plotting or by joining with others. Equal ability produces equal hope of getting what we want, and when two people want the same thing, they become enemies. Hobbes names three principal causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence (that is, distrust) and glory, which make people attack for gain, for safety and for reputation. Then he turns to the reader who finds this too dark. When you travel, you arm yourself; when you go to sleep, you lock your doors, and even at home you lock your chests, although there are laws and armed public officers to protect you. What does that say about your opinion of your fellow citizens? What the caveman leaves out is that Hobbes called striking first the most reasonable way to stay safe, and that his way out is also reason: articles of peace, then a covenant to obey a sovereign.

Rousseau Never Said “Noble Savage”

Rousseau did think humans are naturally good, but “good” in his sense means uncorrupted, not admirable. And the phrase “noble savage” is not his.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau accuses Hobbes of projecting society back onto nature: he had smuggled into the state of nature “numberless passions which are the work of society” (in the translation on Project Gutenberg). Rousseau’s natural human is solitary, has few needs, and is moved by self-preservation and by pity, a natural reluctance to see another creature suffer. Rousseau calls pity the only natural virtue, yet also says natural humans had neither vices nor virtues in the moral sense. The goodness he means is closer to innocence than to merit. He later said, in his 1762 letter to Christophe de Beaumont, that the natural goodness of man was the principle behind all his writings, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises his view the same way: good by nature, corrupted by society.

The corruption begins when people settle together and start comparing themselves. Once everyone wants to be looked at, and “public esteem acquires a value”, Rousseau calls it “the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice”. His name for this comparative self-love is amour-propre, which he distinguishes in a note to the Discourse from amour de soi, the plain drive to stay alive; some scholars argue it only turns toxic in its “inflamed” forms. As for the “noble savage”, the phrase appears in English in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada (published 1672). The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy argued in 1923 that the Discourse was not the primitivist hymn it was taken for, and the anthropologist Ter Ellingson argues in The Myth of the Noble Savage (2001) that the claim Rousseau invented the figure is easily refuted, and that the myth of savage nobility was largely a mid-nineteenth-century construction. The beaming sponge is not wrong to smile. It is wrong to look virtuous.

Freud Thinks the War Is Inside You

Freud accepted something close to Hobbes’s verdict, quoting the old proverb homo homini lupus, “man is a wolf to man”, but he located the conflict inside the individual rather than only between individuals.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that people are not gentle creatures who only defend themselves when attacked. The neighbour is also a temptation to aggression, and Freud asks who would have the courage to dispute “Homo homini lupus” in the face of their own life and of history (Joan Riviere’s translation). He then takes on the communists, whose premise, that man is wholly good and spoiled by private property, is essentially Rousseau’s. Abolishing property, Freud argues, would not abolish aggression, which reigned when possessions were still scanty.

In his late model the mind is divided into the id (the drives), the ego (which deals with reality) and the super-ego (the internalised voice of parents and society), set out in The Ego and the Id (1923), as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains. Civilisation survives by turning aggression inward, where the super-ego uses it against the self as guilt. Hence the title: civilised people are discontented by design. The crab in a panicked whirl fits him well, three agencies pulling in different directions, with the ego trying to stay upright.

Wolf or God, Depending on the Neighbours

The wolf line is older than both Hobbes and Freud, and the way Hobbes used it complicates the feral caveman.

The proverb is usually traced to Plautus’s comedy Asinaria, where the line is conditional: a man is a wolf to a man who does not yet know what sort he is. Hobbes used it in the dedication of De Cive (Latin 1642, English 1651), and he paired it with its opposite. Both sayings are true, he writes: man to man is a kind of god, and “Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe”. The first holds “if we compare Citizens amongst themselves”, the second if we compare cities. So even Hobbes, the meme’s caveman, did not think humans were simply beasts. He thought they become wolves or gods depending on the arrangements they live under. That brings him closer to Rousseau than the meme suggests, though Hobbes still roots conflict in natural passions, while Rousseau thinks the passions themselves are social.

Nietzsche Doubts There Is an Essence at All

The three positions in the meme agree on one thing: there is a fixed human nature to describe. Nietzsche questioned exactly that.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), section 62, he calls the human being das noch nicht festgestellte Thier, the animal whose nature is not yet fixed. The phrase denies that there is a finished human essence waiting under the layers of civilisation, and suggests that what humans are is still being decided. Nietzsche wrote it in a passage about religion preserving what he saw as failed specimens of the species, so the open future he imagined was not a democratic one. Much of twentieth-century philosophy echoed one branch or another of the thought, from existentialism’s claim that existence precedes essence to the constructionist arguments discussed in our post on human nature versus social constructs. Biologists and psychologists, for their part, continue to study stable human dispositions, so the debate is far from settled. Anyone claiming to know the essence of man has to deal with how differently it has looked across cultures and centuries.

Three Faces, One Animal

The meme gives each thinker one face, but all three still show up for work.

Hobbes’s logic of insecurity still turns up in analyses of collapsing states, for instance in Barry Posen’s 1993 essay “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict”, which treats the collapse of a state as a return to anarchy among the groups left behind. Rousseau’s worry about comparison needs little defending to anyone who owns a phone. Freud’s specifics have taken a beating from later psychology, but his point that the conflict between what we want and what we are allowed moves inside us has aged better. Which face shows depends on where the creature lives, and that’s about as close to an essence as the evidence lets us get.

For what Nietzsche thought had happened to human morality along the way, read our post on Nietzsche on morality and the Genealogy of Morals.