Once the individual can be considered apart from society, another question becomes unavoidable.
What is the individual?
The question sounds ancient. But it acquires a new force when political philosophy begins to imagine society as something constructed from relations among individuals.
If political order is not simply natural, then neither can human behaviour within that order be taken for granted.
What are human beings like before institutions shape them?
Are they naturally cooperative?
Naturally competitive?
Driven by reason, desire, fear or self-interest?
Do social arrangements express human nature, or do they create the kinds of people who inhabit them?
These questions had precedents. Aristotle had offered a rich account of human nature, including the claim that human beings are political animals. But the emerging philosophical situation makes human nature itself increasingly available for reconstruction.
Hobbes provides one striking example. His imagined state of nature is not simply a description of an actual historical period. It is a conceptual experiment.
Take away political authority.
What follows?
The answer is meant to reveal something about the conditions under which political order becomes necessary.
This is a new use of philosophical possibility.
Instead of beginning with the world as it happens to be, philosophy can construct a hypothetical world in order to discover what must be true of the world we actually inhabit.
Other thinkers will construct very different human beings.
Locke's individual is not Hobbes's individual. Rousseau's is different again.
The disagreements are important. But perhaps the deeper historical transformation lies in the possibility they share:
human nature can be made into a philosophical variable.
It can be imagined differently.
And if human nature can be imagined differently, then social arrangements can be compared according to the kinds of human beings they produce or presuppose.
This changes political philosophy.
It also changes philosophy more broadly.
Nature is no longer simply the external order studied by natural philosophy. The nature of the human being becomes a problem that may require interpretation, reconstruction and argument.
The distinction between what is natural and what is conventional becomes increasingly difficult.
Language is learned.
Custom is inherited.
Institutions are constructed.
Desires may be cultivated.
Beliefs can be transmitted.
Yet these acquired structures can become so deeply embedded that they appear natural.
The philosopher therefore faces a new task:
to distinguish what human beings are from what they have become.
That distinction will prove extraordinarily powerful—and extraordinarily difficult.
For there may be no simple human being waiting underneath culture, language and history.
The individual who appears to stand outside society may already have been formed by it.
The attempt to discover human nature therefore begins to reveal something paradoxical.
The more philosophy tries to strip away what is socially and historically acquired, the more it discovers that the human being is constituted through relations that cannot easily be stripped away.
The question of human nature has thus become entangled with the question of history.
And that opens another possibility.
Perhaps human beings cannot be understood adequately by asking only what they are.
Perhaps we must also ask:
How did human beings become what they are?
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