arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men…. Consciousness is
therefore from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men
exist ” (Marx & Engels, 1947, p.19). Marx believes these unique physiological skills
that humans have developed are evidence that human nature is inherently social.
Likewise, Marx also characterises human nature as limitless and having a tendency
towards self-flourishing. He believed that the division of labour within capitalist
societies limited human flourishing because the assigned labour is a result of coercion
rather than natural allocation. Individuals are forced to take up jobs for a wage rather
than completing jobs they were proficient in. Whereas in a communist society, without
the division of labour, “ nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can
become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow ” (Marx & Engels, 1976, p.47). As a result, if individuals had the freedom to
choose their labour, they would naturally self-flourish because they would have “ the
full development of human mastery over the forces of nature … the absolute working
out of [their] creative potentialities … the development of all human powers as an end
in itself ” (Marx, 1973, p.488).
Writing at the time of the English Civil War, Hobbes’s conception of human nature
stems from the chaos and destruction that the civil war brought. Resultingly, Hobbes
envisioned human nature as compromising of self- interest and competition. Hobbes’s
reasoning for human nature being self- interested is that “the qualities that our senses
perceive are not inherent to external objects but are caused by motion from the
external object upon the brain” (Boucher & Kelly, 2017, p.221). In other words, our
interpretation of reality is based on our senses, so our understanding of reality is
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