Machiavelli, Hobbes, More, and Aristotle on Political Human Nature
This essay examines how four political thinkers — Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas More, and Aristotle — differ in their assumptions about human nature and what those assumptions imply for governance. The paper argues that Machiavelli and Hobbes ground their political advice in a realistic, often pessimistic view of human behavior, prioritizing survival and power over moral ideals. Aristotle and Thomas More, by contrast, orient their frameworks toward ethical improvement, asking not merely what people do but what they ought to do. The essay also complicates this neat division by identifying shared intellectual commitments across the four thinkers.
- Introduction: Two Visions of Political Theory: Frames realist vs. idealist divide among thinkers
- Machiavelli and the Politics of Survival: Machiavelli prioritizes expedience over moral goodness
- Hobbes and the State of Nature: Hobbes views life as brutal struggle for survival
- Aristotle and the Pursuit of the Good: Aristotle argues all things tend toward the good
- Thomas More and the Utopian Ideal: More prescribes moral and ethical leadership ideals
- Points of Convergence Among the Four Thinkers: Shared commitments complicate the realist-idealist binary
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses direct quotations from primary sources — The Prince, Leviathan, the Nicomachean Ethics, and Utopia — to ground each claim rather than relying on paraphrase alone.
- The concluding section resists the easy binary the prompt establishes, demonstrating critical thinking by identifying intellectual overlap across thinkers usually placed in opposition.
- Each philosopher is introduced with a defining passage that captures their core premise, giving the essay a clean comparative architecture that is easy for readers to follow.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay demonstrates comparative textual analysis: it sets two pairs of thinkers against each other (Machiavelli/Hobbes vs. Aristotle/More), then complicates that opposition in the final section. This move — establish a contrast, then qualify it — is a hallmark of sophisticated argumentative writing and shows the writer can hold competing ideas in tension rather than forcing a false dichotomy.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by framing the central question, then devotes a paragraph to each of the four thinkers in sequence: Machiavelli, Hobbes, More, and Aristotle. This allows direct comparison of adjacent pairs. The final paragraph steps back from the sequence to synthesize, noting where Machiavelli shares ground with Aristotle and where More agrees with Hobbes despite their differences. The structure moves from exposition to analysis to synthesis.
Introduction: Two Visions of Political Theory
Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes appear to recommend political actions and systems that take people "the way they are." In contrast, Thomas More and Aristotle appear to recommend political actions and systems designed to help people change the way they are. Yet this neat division, while useful as a starting point, requires careful qualification. An examination of all four thinkers reveals both the genuine differences between the realist and idealist camps and certain unexpected points of common ground.
Machiavelli and the Politics of Survival
According to the introduction to his text The Prince, Machiavelli believes that "the way humans act and should act are seldom the same." What Machiavelli means by this, however, is not that human beings fail to uphold their innately good ideals. What the theorist and advisor means is that a human being in a position of power does not have the luxury of asking himself what is good. A leader can only ask what is expedient for his state and what will continue his reign of power.
For Machiavelli, because he is advising a prince of a nation, the prince's survival is deemed to be good for both the man and the state. However, it is not goodness itself that is to be aimed at, but the ends — namely, survival. The means is whatever gets one to that end of political survival and achievement.
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