Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan, and I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with

the Federalist lecture number five today, human nature in the Federalist. In this lecture, Dr. Pastrido takes his time in explaining the view of human nature that we see

presented by Publius throughout the Federalist, both the good and the bad.

And the recognition of the bad is what differentiates Americans from, say, their French

contemporaries and other Enlightenment thinkers who thought men were continually improving, getting better, and reaching a state of perfection.

Publius says, you have to remember that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. So four words there. We need to look at all of them. He says are. That's present tense. It means this is the way human beings are. Not the way they were. Not the way the past shows us they were and the future is going to be different. Just this is how human beings are. They're ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. And if you're forming a government, a free government, you have to consider that men are not perfect and they have some things that are pretty bad about them.

This is what I love about our founders is that they're not reactionary.

They were prudent and that's why they were good statesmen.

And what makes me think that is that they were not just reacting to those, like you mentioned, the French had this ideal

of human beings as essentially good. And they don't just react and say there's just this bad

side of human nature, but they recognize that there's the good side also. And they say a

Republican form of government actually depends on that good side. You can't have a

Republican form of government without the good side, but you can't forget also the bad side.

So they are prudent in the sense that they're looking at the whole picture, the whole human being.

If men do have bad qualities about them and all men have bad qualities about them, you need government.

That's the purpose of government in the first place to protect the rights of the citizens

against those who would do them harm. But if you know that all men have defects in their

character, you don't want to invest too much power in any one man. You have to spread it out, and you have to allow those who display the best character,

who give us reasons to hold them in esteem, as they say, later in the book.

That's how you have a free society.

So you have to balance the defects with the virtues of human nature, and the whole structure of the Constitution

is designed to minimize the bad and elevate the good that is in a human being. And this is a

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