Another huge change was the decline of religion, which altered how we viewed human nature. Previously it had been assumed, as David Hume put it in ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’ (1742) ‘that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest’. Even Bertrand Russell, an atheist, said no one should run a school who didn’t have a deep conviction of original sin.
