In the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes offered a bleak assessment of human life before civilisation. In Leviathan, he famously described life in a “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. According to Hobbes, without strong authority, law and social hierarchy, humans would descend into violence and chaos. Civilisation, he argued, was not merely beneficial, but necessary for survival and order.
This view shaped Western thinking for centuries and in many quarters still does.
It justified colonial expansion, state power, and the belief that so-called “primitive” societies lived lives of constant fear and deprivation. Indigenous peoples were framed as living examples of what humans were without progress. Civilisation, in this narrative, was a gift. Order was salvation. Authority was benevolence.
The problem is that Hobbes was wrong
Not maliciously wrong, but empirically wrong. He was speculating from a distance, relying on second-hand reports, colonial mythmaking, and philosophical inference rather than evidence. Hobbes never lived among hunter-gatherer societies. He never observed how they raised children, resolved conflict, shared resources, or structured intimacy. He also had a very tough life himself and once stated his mother gave birth to twins – himself and fear. By today’s standards we’d describe him as a life-long cynical depressive.
What anthropologists have found over the last century stands in stark contrast to Hobbes’ assumptions. Far from living short, violent, miserable lives, many hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed lives that were socially rich, relatively healthy, and surprisingly stable. While their lives were physically demanding and subject to environmental risk, they were not the constant war zones Hobbes imagined They also on average lived to aged 70 (we won’t get involved with the mathematical complexities of ‘life expectancy’ when factoring in infant mortality). In particular, females shared the same autonomy as males; effectively between 95% and 99% of our entire existence as a species has witnessed female emancipation.
Our ancestors, the foragers
Hunter-gatherer groups typically lived in small, egalitarian communities. Cooperation, not hierarchical authority, was the organising principle. Food was shared, child-rearing was undertaken collectively and hierarchies were shallow or actively resisted. Conflict certainly existed, but it was often diffused through social mechanisms such as humour, mediation, mobility, or temporary separation.
Violence, where it occurred, was not the default state. In fact, many anthropologists now argue that large-scale, organised violence became more common after the rise of agriculture and civilisation, not before it. Permanent settlements, resource accumulation, and rigid hierarchies introduced new incentives for warfare, control, and inequality. Not just of assets and resources but females too who effectively became items on a ledger.
Life may not have been easy in pre-agricultural societies, but it was not universally grim. Work hours were far fewer than those of early agricultural peasants. Diets were diverse, plentiful and healthy. Social bonds were strong and people were rarely isolated.
Hobbes projected his world view back in time
The Hobbesian view also underestimated the importance of community in regulating behaviour. Hobbes assumed that without an external authority, humans would act purely in self-interest. Anthropology suggests otherwise. In small groups where reputation matters and survival depends on cooperation, antisocial behaviour carries real social consequences. Shame, reciprocity and mutual dependence can be powerful regulators.
Civilisation for many created lives more like Hobbes’ imagined descriptions of pre-civilised peoples. For example. there is a lot of evidence that as we moved into the agriculture era between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago our average height dropped, oral health declined and we introduced a raft of diseases from close proximity to newly farmed animals. Our overall diet certainly changed from hugely varied to more concentrated which you hear echoes of in today’s health advice.
What did the Romans ever do for us?
Of course modern civilisation has arguably brought undeniable benefits. Advances in medicine, technology, literacy, and longevity are real and meaningful and we all enjoy them. We may even still be alive because of them. But the idea that civilisation replaced a universally miserable existence with a superior one is far too simple. Equally powerful arguments can show that many modern diseases and physical and mental health problems were created by civilisation – our diets, stresses, water and air quality. A story for another blog.
What civilisation did was trade universal freedoms for all for security for some at the expense of others. Loneliness, alienation, chronic stress and inequality are not innate features of the human condition. They are features of social organisation in all civilisations, now and ever since we first created them.
The Hobbesian illusion persists today whenever we assume that modern life is inherently better, more advanced, or more humane than what came before and has lingered long past its usefulness. Letting it go does not mean rejecting civilisation. It means recognising that the human story has always been more complicated, and more hopeful, than Hobbes ever imagined.
In effect, Hobbes’s views, which persist today in influential people, were and remain the diametric opposite to what we believe an Intimate Ape really is. We try to get to the heart of who we are leaving Hobbes at the door, after all he has been dead for over three centuries.