The idea of universal human nature has been under attack for quite some time.

It is not the recent invention of pragmatists and postmodernists who indict universalism as a form of epistemic violence,

nor is it the latest accomplishment of progressive social activists who portray the biological normativity of gender and the family as chief obstacles to civil liberty.

Rather, modern Western political thought can largely be understood as a revolt against a common

human nature, that is, a universal state of nature. According to the political myths of Thomas

Hobbs and John Locke, the political sovereign

rescues individuals from an unruly and violent state of nature. Positive laws bring natural

man out of a dangerous world of conflicting needs through a civilizing process beginning

with the social contract. An extreme version of the myth comes from the Enlightenment thinker Jacques

Rousseau. For Rousseau, man's natural powers must be overcome entirely by acquired powers

derived from socialization under the law of the sovereign. On this modern, broadly liberal,

political view, the universal state of human nature appears as something to be subdued or escaped and left behind forever through the socializing pact.

These political thinkers did not deny the existence of human nature or even natural rights.

However, they crudely divided human nature into two forms,

according to a standard of civilization, the state of nature and that of the citizen.

The political commonwealth stood as the necessary and definitive safeguard to protect the various

rights and liberties of its citizens.

The right to private property being the most important.

Today, of course, we often think of private property in polarized political terms.

My right to do whatever I want with my own body or my right to possess a firearm.

And yet our modern intuitions remain virtually unchanged. Most people continue to look to the nation state as the exclusive

proprietor of rights, the producer of rights. Our modern trust in the social contracts promised to deliver us from a precarious state of

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