Similarities Between Aristotle And Hobbes

Human nature, or essence, is our innate way of being, it is what makes us who we are. It is who we are without the influence of polis, society, or state. It is a presumptions that all philosophers make in order to develop their theories about the creation of society and support their beliefs about what the ideal society would look like.
Aristotle believes that in nature man is either a “beast or a god”, because without the polis, they are no better than an animal. He says that at the core, man is a political animal and it is in our nature that we progress towards our telos which is eudaimonia. It is only when man is part of a polis that he can truly fulfill this telos.
In a sense, Hobbes ideas are relatively similar to those of Aristotle, because he also thinks that man is better when he is part of the polis. Without the polis, Hobbes finds that life is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, because people are hungry for …show more content…
In his good community, there are no classes, no wages, no religion, no property, no rent, and free education. These are the instruments that man has used to oppress one another. For the ideal community to be achieved each individual must emancipated of these oppressions to be true to their species-being. In The Jewish Question, he explained that, “Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete.” After this emancipation, man would be free to create and produce based off his own inclination. In place of dependency on waged workers, he could rely on his own neighbor, and the community would flourish and survive