The connections Pinker draws in his new book between human nature and political systems were prefigured in Enlightenment debates and in the framing of the American Constitution.

True: Enlightenment thinkers (for example Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Kant) and the framers of the US Constitution (for example Madison in Federalist No. 10 and No. 51) explicitly linked their views of human nature to the design of political systems, in ways matching the links Pinker draws in The Blank Slate (2002). Mostly true: such links are well documented for either the Enlightenment or the framing, and only somewhat thinner for the other. Mixed: there is documented precedent in one setting but little in the other, or the precedents only loosely match his arguments. Mostly false: the historical figures discussed human nature, but did not tie it to political design in the ways claimed. False: historians of ideas show no such links existed.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 The Federalist Number 10, [22 November] 1787 Founders Online (National Archives, James Madison Papers) · 22 November 1787

   “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.”

2. E2 The Federalist Number 51, [6 February] 1788 - Founders Online Founders Online (National Archives, James Madison Papers) · 6 February 1788

   “But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

3. E3 Beyond Hume: Recovering the Scottish Enlightenment Background of James Madison's Thought The Review of Politics (Cambridge University Press) · 2026

   “Hutcheson, Witherspoon, and Ferguson endorsed this theory of countervailing passions, which pit ambition against ambition in the very structure of government.”

4. E4 Beyond Hume: Recovering the Scottish Enlightenment Background of James Madison's Thought The Review of Politics (Cambridge University Press) · 2026

   “Adair popularized the poignant, though unfounded, image of Madison composing Federalist 10 with Hume's Essays open on his desk.”

Madison's own Federalist papers tie political design directly to human nature: No. 10 traces faction to "the nature of man" (E1), and No. 51 calls government "the greatest of all reflections on human nature" (E2). That makes the precedent at the framing of the Constitution well documented. For the Enlightenment, a peer-reviewed article reports that Hutcheson, Witherspoon and Ferguson backed a theory of countervailing passions built into the structure of government (E3), though the same article disputes the popular story that Madison drew closely on Hume (E4). The Enlightenment side rests on less evidence here, and none of the evidence describes the specific arguments in Pinker's book, so the claim is mostly true rather than fully confirmed.