Does hobbes accept the position of machiavelli that man is bad?

Question

According to the Leviathan chap 13

Answer 1

Not exactly. In Chapter 13 of Leviathan, Hobbes explains how people act in a world without government or law. He says they compete, they’re suspicious, and they want to protect what they have. But he’s not saying they are bad. He’s describing how anyone would act if they had no reason to trust others and no protection from harm. It’s more about survival than morality.

Machiavelli takes a stronger stance. He sees people as selfish and dishonest by default, even in organized society. He warns leaders to expect betrayal and use whatever tactics are needed to stay in power. His view is more psychological and judgmental, like he’s telling rulers to assume the worst in people.

So if we’re looking at Chapter 13 specifically, Hobbes does not agree with Machiavelli that man is bad. He’s explaining behavior, not condemning it. The two thinkers both believe that people can’t be fully trusted, but Hobbes is focused on structure and safety, while Machiavelli is focused on strategy and control.

Answer 2

Both accept that man is "bad". For both Hobbes and Machiavelli, the bad could be taken to refer to the self-seeking, unsympathetic nature of man. Without any laws or modern political or social institutions, Hobbes saw all men in a constant state of war where all were against all in the pursuit of selfish desires, thus making life "nasty, poor, brutish and short". Machiavelli seems to recognize this too when he answers his own question as to whether it is better for a prince to be loved than feared by his people. He says it is better to be feared, "Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely" (Paragraph 32, Chapter XVII of The Prince). That description is almost entirely compatible with Hobbes'.

Answer 3

Although Hobbes did not consistently describe his philosophical methodology, most scholars agree that he used a “resolutive-compositive” method.[2] According to this method, one comes to understand a given object of inquiry by intellectually “resolving” it into its essential parts and then subsequently “composing” it back into a whole. In this way, Hobbes argued that societies and politics should be analysed at different levels. He first reduced the commonwealth into parts, such as human beings, and then reduced humans further to ‘the motions of natural bodies’, before taking this to the ultimate hypothetical level of reducing this to the ‘state of nature’. After such a resolution, Hobbes recomposed the commonwealth from the abstract investigation of human nature, to the study of human bodies, to finally the examination of political bodies. It is this reductionist methodology, which shows why Hobbes placed so much emphasis on the importance of human nature, which I will discuss later.