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.
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.
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.
Thomas Hobbes likewise attempts to paint a picture not of an idealized world of good, but of a place where things tend not toward the good but toward evil. Not only is life, in the philosopher's famous phrase, nasty, brutish, and short, but as Hobbes states: "for as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself" (Leviathan, Chapter 13). In other words, Hobbes directly contradicts Aristotle's thesis that all things tend toward the good.
Rather, Hobbes believes that life is a constant state of battle — a survival of the fittest. This pre-Darwinian struggle is not moral. The good or morally fit may be defeated, in Hobbes' understanding, by the immorally strong. One should not ignore this reality or attempt to change it; one should instead obey the brutish laws of the human jungle and prevent one's subjects from killing one another.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle begins his Nicomachean Ethics by stating that "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." Although Aristotle did influence leaders such as Alexander the Great, he is not primarily concerned with the ends of leadership or with what is accomplished through one's actions, as Machiavelli is. Aristotle's text is concerned with the abstract — specifically, what constitutes ethical goodness.
"Aristotle argues all things tend toward the good"
"More prescribes moral and ethical leadership ideals"
"Shared commitments complicate the realist-idealist binary"
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