Hobbes' claims about human nature, that people are roughly equal in their capacity to harm one another and driven primarily by self-interest and fear, form the foundation of everything else in Leviathan, which means an essay that misreads this starting point tends to misread everything built on top of it. Because the concept feels intuitively graspable, students often skip careful analysis of exactly what Hobbes claims and jump straight to discussing its consequences, producing essays that sound confident but rest on a shaky reading of the source material. A writing guide focused specifically on this concept, distributed before drafting begins, catches these issues earlier than feedback on a finished essay ever can.

The first thing a strong essay needs to establish is precision about what Hobbes actually claims regarding human nature, since "humans are naturally violent" and "humans are naturally equal in vulnerability and therefore rationally distrustful" are meaningfully different claims that lead to different arguments. Students should be encouraged to locate and quote the specific passage where Hobbes describes rough equality of strength and cunning among individuals, since this equality, not inherent malice, is what generates the constant threat of conflict in his account. Starting an essay with an imprecise version of this claim tends to produce imprecise analysis throughout the rest of the piece.

A second foundational move is distinguishing Hobbes' descriptive claim about human nature from any moral judgment about it, since Hobbes is not arguing that self-interest is virtuous or vicious, only that it is a reliable, predictable feature of human psychology that any workable political theory has to account for. Students sometimes write essays that treat Hobbes as either praising or condemning human selfishness, when his actual project is closer to a political engineer's: given this reliable feature of human behavior, what kind of government structure would actually hold together. Framing the essay around this engineering logic, rather than a moral one, usually produces sharper analysis.

Structuring the Body Paragraphs

Once the essay establishes what Hobbes actually claims about human nature, each body paragraph should trace one specific consequence of that claim rather than listing several loosely connected observations. A paragraph on competition, for instance, should explain how equality of vulnerability leads to competition over scarce resources, how that competition leads to a cycle of preemptive aggression, and how that cycle produces the pervasive insecurity Hobbes describes, all within a single connected chain of reasoning. This kind of paragraph-level causal tracing is what separates an essay demonstrating real understanding from one simply listing facts about the text in sequence.

• Open with a precise, textually grounded statement of what Hobbes claims about human nature, not a vague paraphrase
• Distinguish Hobbes' descriptive psychological claim from any moral judgment about human selfishness
• Trace a full causal chain within each body paragraph rather than listing disconnected observations
• Use direct textual evidence for each major claim about human nature, cited to a specific passage
• Address at least one way a modern reader might question Hobbes' assumptions about human motivation

Handling Counterarguments About Human Nature

Strong essays on this topic usually address, at some point, whether Hobbes' assumptions about human motivation hold up against modern challenges, such as research on cooperation and altruism that complicates a purely self-interested model of human behavior. This does not require students to have deep knowledge of behavioral psychology; it simply requires acknowledging that Hobbes' starting assumptions are contestable rather than self-evidently true, and briefly explaining why. An essay that treats Hobbes' account of human nature as an unquestioned fact, rather than a philosophical premise open to challenge, tends to read as less sophisticated than one that engages with its contestability directly.

A useful writing exercise before drafting is asking students to generate one genuine counterexample to Hobbes' claim about universal self-interest, drawn from their own knowledge or experience, and then to consider how Hobbes might respond to it. This does not need to appear in the final essay in full, but the exercise of generating and testing a counterexample tends to sharpen a student's understanding of exactly how far Hobbes' claim extends and where its limits might be, which produces more precise and confident writing even in paragraphs that ultimately agree with Hobbes rather than challenge him.

Revising Drafts for Precision

When reviewing a draft on human nature before final submission, the single most valuable revision question a teacher or student can ask is whether every sentence claiming to describe "what Hobbes says" is actually traceable to a specific passage in the text, or whether some of those sentences have drifted into the student's own paraphrase without the writer noticing the drift. This kind of drift is extremely common in essays about human nature specifically, since the concept feels intuitively familiar and students sometimes substitute their own assumptions for Hobbes' actual claims without realizing they have done so.

A revision pass focused specifically on this issue, checking each claim about Hobbes against the actual text, catches exactly the kind of subtle inaccuracy that can undermine an otherwise well-organized and clearly written essay. This is also one of the more time-consuming parts of the grading process for a teacher, since it requires checking claims against the source text rather than just evaluating the writing on its own terms, which is precisely why building this verification step into the student's own revision process, before submission, saves significant grading time while also producing more accurate, more defensible final essays.