Noble savage

The idea that humans are naturally good and become corrupted by civilization. It is a recurring cultural trope, not a claim about a single historical people.

Michel de Montaigne: A French Renaissance essayist whose writing examined custom, cultural difference, and human judgment. His essay on cannibals challenged European assumptions about whose customs were civilized.
State of nature: A hypothetical condition of human life without political authority or organized society. The trope depends on imagining what people would be like before social institutions.
Thomas Hobbes: An English political philosopher who described life without common authority as insecure and violent. His account reverses the trope’s image of naturally peaceful people corrupted by society.
Primitivism in art: The use or idealization of forms associated with societies imagined as primitive in modern art. Artists recast the ideal of uncorrupted nature through borrowed styles and cultural imagery.
John Dryden: An English poet and playwright whose works include the 1672 play The Conquest of Granada. His play helped popularize the phrase “noble savage,” though not the later theory in full.
Human nature: The characteristic capacities, tendencies, and limits attributed to human beings. The trope makes a specific claim about whether goodness belongs to human nature.
John Locke: An English philosopher who treated the mind as shaped by experience and defended natural rights. His state of nature is neither Rousseau’s idyllic past nor Hobbes’s war of all against all.
Colonialism: A system in which one power controls another territory and its people for political or economic ends. Idealized portrayals could coexist with colonial rule rather than challenge its power.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An eighteenth-century philosopher who argued that social institutions produce inequality and distort human development. His account of natural goodness became closely associated with the trope, despite important differences.
Civilization: A form of human society associated with institutions, settled life, and complex cultural practices. The trope casts civilization as the force that corrupts natural goodness.

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