History and the Family
This chapter examines the role of history and the family in debates over human sociability and the foundations of politics, drawing attention to how David Hume was able to revolutionize the use of state-of-nature conjectures in order to elucidate the emergence of institutional structures and related moral values. According to Thomas Hobbes, human psychology was fundamentally characterized by the balancing of appetites and aversions: all motivation could be explained in terms of the seeking of private pleasure and the avoidance of private pain. Bernard Mandeville essentially followed Hobbes, refusing to give any role to fellow feeling in explaining human sociability. The chapter first considers Hume's rejection of Hobbes's and Mandeville's reductive accounts of human psychology before discussing Hobbes's views on the question of the family and his notion of the state of nature. It also analyzes the debate involving Hobbes's British successors, namely: Mandeville, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and Francis Hutcheson.