Conceived in sin: The Founders' view of human nature

The Federalist wrestles with the task of creating a government for a flawed and selfish creature: Man. It eschews revolutionary optimism and embraces a dark realism.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Like artists, revolutionaries often overestimate their ability to reshape reality. So enraptured are they by the beautiful creation they envisage that they disregard the limitations, the stubborn flaws and imperfections, of their material, believing that their own fervor and righteousness can, as it were, straighten the crooked timber of humanity. Sure, humans might appear rude, cruel, violent, impulsive, even depraved, but that is only because their innately noble characters have been corrupted by the artificial inducements and blandishments of a debauched society. After the revolution, a new human—and a new people—will arise without the stain of original sin.

Writing in 2024, one hardly needs to warn about the parade of atrocities that often follows this prediction of a paradisal future. We have the tragic and bloody lessons of the French and Russian Revolutions. We know that few things so reliably lead to ruin as the pursuit of paradise. Those of us who are conservative might also extract a more general though less poetic lesson from such social upheavals: Revolution itself is the enemy and ought to be avoided.

And yet, this generalization runs into an immediate and embarrassing exception: The United States of America, the world’s preeminent superpower, was created in the crucible of revolution. And today, the American revolution—or revolutions, for I mean both independence and the Constitution of 1787—is praised more by self-proclaimed conservatives than by liberals or progressives. Of course, as many wags have noted, radicals of one generation are often celebrated by conservatives of the next. But the plaudits with which conservatives lavish the creation of America do not merely confirm the inevitable hypocrisy of conservatism. America was different. And it was different because its Founders, though revolutionary, were keenly aware of the limitations of their materials.¹

For the Founders had a pessimistic outlook on human nature.² To them, man was a frail, selfish, factious, and contentious animal with instincts and passions that often overwhelmed reason. As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his justly famous The American Political Tradition:

The men who drew up the Constitution in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 had a vivid Calvinistic sense of human evil and damnation and believed with Hobbes that men are selfish and contentious.

The Founders believed that society was imperfect because man was imperfect, that original sin was ineradicable, and that the promise of paradise is often a siren’s song to hell. They were thoroughly and explicitly anti-utopian. To be sure, they were children of the Enlightenment, drawing on political writings from Cicero to Sidney to Montesquieu, but they were resolutely of the constrained vision. They valued science and education, but they rejected as dangerous fantasy the notion of a pliable human nature that would be transfigured by revolution. As Benjamin Wright noted:

In the book [The Federalist] there is no suggestion of a conception similar to that of Marx, that after the Revolution and the period of dictatorship the nature of man will be vastly improved because the barriers to wisdom and virtue will have been removed.

The Founders’ view of human nature is perhaps best gleaned from The Federalist, a collection of essays written in defense of the new Constitution (of 1787). Because these essays are essentially elevated propaganda written for immediate political purposes, The Federalist is not a work of systematic political philosophy, still less of systematic political psychology. It is not, in other words, a work that carefully lays out a theory of human nature which it then relies upon to craft a philosophically persuasive theory of good government (ad modum Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan). Nevertheless, it does contain extended analyses of human nature and especially of human motivation:

Consequently, what confronts us in The Federalist is not so much a comprehensive theory of “human nature” as a theory of “human motivation,” related to political action.

What is more, its arguments about federalism, separation of powers, the danger and control of factions et cetera are built upon a definite conception of human nature, a conception that remains consistent throughout the essays. And bleak. Again, from Benjamin Wright:

The most striking and possibly most important element in the theory of human nature expressed in The Federalist is that men are not to be trusted with power because they are selfish, passionate, full of whims, caprices, and prejudices.

Thus, a reader expecting an optimistic account of the American character, freed from the British yolk, flourishing among independent states but ready to unite to create a larger and more virtuous union, will immediately be surprised by the skepticism, cynicism, and pessimism he encounters. In Federalist No. 6, for example, Hamilton writes:

A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.

More pessimistically, he immediately rebuts the hopeful retort that republics soften the war-like spirit of man through commerce and a recognition of mutual interests:

Is it not…the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?

To expect new political arrangements to transform man into a peaceful creature is as foolish (and foolhardy) as expecting the comforts of a mansion to transform a wolf into a Labrador Retriever. Human nature is intransigent. Political schemes that rely upon a miracle of metamorphosis whereby mankind changes from benighted chrysalis to enlightened butterfly are doomed to failure. Instead, we should recognize and accept “…the folly and wickedness of mankind…” and make…“the proper deduction for the ordinary depravity of human nature…”

Hamilton’s writings in The Federalist and elsewhere suggest he had a dimmer view of humans than Madison, but Madison was the more astute and incisive thinker; and his essays, particularly No. 10, No. 49, and No. 51 are full of penetrating analyses of man as a political creature and of the structure a government that hopes to constrain him while not trampling his liberties must take. Any analysis of the Founders’ theory of human nature must focus here—especially on Federalist No. 10.

In this essay, Madison wrestles with the challenge of human factiousness, a proclivity to division and conflict so powerful that “…where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient…” Madison defines a faction as:

…a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Two features of this definition are crucial for understanding Madison’s conception of human nature and its relation to social behavior and politics. First, although a faction is often conceived as a contentious minority group, Madison contends that it can comprise the majority of a community. Factions are not defined by size or popularity. Even if 90% of the people belong to some coalition or interest-group, that coalition or interest-group can be a faction because it can oppose the true interests of the community.

Thus, absolute democracy does not guarantee wisdom or freedom; in fact, absolute democracy is treacherous because it creates and empowers majority factions, which can then trample the rights of the community. The people are not infallible. They are often benighted and fractious. And they must be restrained.

And second, there are “permanent and aggregate interests” of the society. A faction is defined in opposition to these interests (and to individual rights). To the extent that The Federalist evinces optimism, it is that such common, aggregate interests exist and can be pursued by a wisely structured government. Society is more than a series of zero-sum interactions and politics more than a game of cynical sloganeering and dispossession. Of course, conflict is inevitable because humans are irremediably selfish, and reason is irremediably fallible; but humans can cooperate to promote shared community interests.

At times the Founders wrote optimistically of the power of a disinterested statesman to pursue this elevated common interest; but The Federalist is largely pessimistic, convinced that the sins of humanity pervade all classes of people, who are thus prone to “impulse as well as self-interest” and thus the best one can hope for is a constant clash of competing interest groups so that no tyrannical majority achieves power. As Madison’s writes:

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

Madison’s salutary rejection of utopian thinking is apparent as he discusses the best way to manage factionalism. He argues that “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.” And there are two ways of removing the causes. First, one can eradicate “the liberty which is essential to its existence,” and second, one can strive to give “every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”

The first of these is a cure worse than the disease. One might as well annihilate the air to eliminate the threat of fire. The second is impossible. Like Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver’s Travels mocked mankind’s propensity for factionalism with a story of a long and bloody conflict between Lilliputians who break their eggs on the small end and those who break their eggs on the big end, Madison recognized that even trifling differences between humans could instigate passionate conflicts. Tribalism is not an aberration and is ineradicable because “the latent causes of faction are…sown into the fabric of man.” In absence of any consequential difference, men will invent picayune differences about which to fight.

But perhaps more important, since men have different talents and abilities, they will acquire “different degrees and kinds of property,” and these differences in the possession of property will inevitably lead to different factions. Thus, “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property” and “those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

Some have seen Madison as a kind of proto-Marxist with reversed priorities, a champion of the propertied and affluent striving to protect the “opulent minority from the majority.” But Madison was grappling with a problem recognized at least since Aristotle. In any tolerably free society, resources will be unevenly distributed. And since the poor and the propertyless will vastly outnumber the wealthy, they could collectively revolt and expropriate the resources of the “opulent minority."

Of course, modern revolutionaries would welcome such a revolt against the rich; but The Federalist fears not only the redistribution of property but also the ambitions of the demagogue who would likely trigger and lead the revolt:

…that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government…of those men who have overturned the liberty of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

What is more, Madison clearly envisages other causes of faction. He does not believe class interests are the only cause of faction, though he does think they are the most common. One suspects that Madison would not at all be shocked by the power and apparent intractability of our culture wars. As he notes:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Madison concludes that the causes of faction are impossible to eliminate. There is no common purpose, no general will, to which all men will or should submit. Group conflict, like the weather, is ineluctable. But just as steel shelters and lightning rods and drainage pipes can mitigate the damage of storms, so too wisely crafted government can mitigate the damage of factions.

Minimizing the mischief of a minority faction, Madison thinks, is reasonably straightforward because the majority can “defeat” the “sinister views” of the minority “by regular vote.” The minority can still harass the administration and provoke unseemly passions and convulsions in society; but its dangers are circumscribed. On the other hand, a majority faction, which can crush the rights and interests of the community, is vastly more menacing.

Madison is too much of a realist to expect much help from morality or religion, since they hardly restrain individual depravity, let alone the depravity of mobs:  

If the impulse and the opportunity [for oppressing minority] be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

The only way to constrain the will to power of men is the will to power of other men: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition…” And republics are better than absolute democracies because they are larger and more varied, creating more factions and making “it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” In other words, the best way to control the effects of factionalism is with more factionalism. Since the better angels of our nature are rather unreliable, our devils must be checked by other devils.  

Madison admits that this might be a reproach of human nature, but notes in Federalist No. 51 that the need for government itself is the greatest of all reproaches of human nature:

It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Although Madison here contends that angels would not need government, neither he nor Hamilton believed, as Thomas Paine did, that government is at best a necessary evil because they believed that government could and should play an active and positive role in society. Hamilton envisaged something closer to a European state than Madison, but both believed that in the absence of government, men would ride roughshod over the rights of other men. Passions would overwhelm reason. Narrow interests would triumph over the collective. And people would be condemned to oppressive poverty and inescapable conflict.

I should note that there are, from time to time, indications of a more optimistic view of humans in The Federalist. For example, in Federalist No. 55, Madison writes:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposed the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us a faithful likeness of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

Still, one could make the case that The Federalist’s support for republicanism is motivated not by a presupposition of the existence of estimable qualities but rather by an acute awareness of the depravity of humans. Certainly, the Founders believed in self-governance, and they were inspired by the idea that science, reason, and learning had enlightened the gloom of ignorance that condemned man to servitude.  

But they emphatically did not believe that most humans were dispassionate or rational or capable of creating and sustaining a well-ordered society.³ In fact, at times they were more pessimistic than this, arguing that even an assembly full of sages (like Socrates) “would still have been a mob” because “in all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.” In other words, even assemblies full of potential philosopher kings, were those sages numerous enough, would devolve into impetuous spectacles of rancor and resentment. Those who have sat through academic meetings are likely to find this dim assessment of assemblies and would-be philosopher kings plausible.  

To summarize briefly, the Founders’ view of human nature seems to comprise the following assumptions:

Humans are not malleable: Human nature is the same as it has always been. And it will not change. Revolution cannot transform sinful man into a rational or virtuous creature.

Humans are selfish: Humans have real affections for other people, but they are primarily driven by perceived self-interest.

Human reason is frail: Reason can discover true, collective interests—but it is also prone to error and disputation.

Interests and passions motivate most behavior: Although reason does cause some behavior, interests and passions are more immediate and powerful causes. And they often overwhelm reason.

Like other important historical figures, the Founders are cited and praised more often than they are read. What is more, they have been so thoroughly mythologized that they appear to us now as cold flawless figures in marble with glances that penetrate the heart of the universe rather than as fleshy and fallible humans who would have been utterly befuddled by the world we inhabit (though not by the persistence of conflict and factions!). Their real views today would strike many as excessively elitist and their pessimism about human nature would likely alienate more than a few voters.

For the Founders were anti-populists who feared unruly passions and worried about excessive democracy. Unlike Robespierre and the more enthusiastic French revolutionaries, they did not believe that the people are good. And unlike Marx and the more optimistic communists, they did not think a new human would arrive after the oppressive debris of the past was finally swept away. Human nature is permanent and unalterable.

They disdained demagogues and were troubled by the idea of a charismatic despot who might use lofty moral claims about the rights of the people to expropriate the property of the wealthy while destroying the liberty of all. And they thought the only way to prevent such a demagogue from rising was by limiting democracy and filtering the impulses of the masses through protective layers of representation.

Self-government is hard. It requires constant diligence. One cannot afford delusions about the nobility of the people or the pliability of human nature.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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1. Obviously there are many causes of the differences between the American Revolution and other revolutions—and the Founders dim view of humanity is perhaps not even the primary cause. But it is also not insignificant and is the focus of this essay.

2. George Washington did not hold the same views as Thomas Jefferson; Thomas Jefferson did not hold the same views as Alexander Hamilton; and Alexander Hamilton did not hold the same views as James Madison. What is more, the Founders, like all dynamic and energetic thinkers, changed their minds. The James Madison of 1788 was not the James Madison of 1808. Nevertheless, one can, without egregious simplification, speak of the basic ideas of the Founders (or the intentions of the Founders, et cetera). At least, that’s the assumption of this essay. Still I feel obliged to offer the caveat that the Founders, like all groups of compelling figures and thinkers, had motley views and obviously did not subscribe to a unified ideology.

3. Thomas Jefferson was more optimistic and was closer to Paine than he was to Hamilton.