In the Right-wing corner we have Thomas Hobbes, founding father of political philosophy, who argued that man is born wicked and must be civilised. Left in a “state of nature”, Hobbes famously argued, our lives would be “nasty, brutish and short”. We would fight continually over power and resources. Deference to authority is therefore an act of self-preservation: we put our faith in strong leaders, and civic institutions such as the law, to save us from ourselves.

And on the Left we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the original romantic, whose gist was that humans start out innocent and get corrupted by society. “Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state,” he declared; it is greed, inequality and the class system that bend us out of shape. All humanity’s woes, argued Rousseau, could be traced back to the first person to enclose a plot of land and claim it as his own: “You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”