It was the Greeks, specifically the democratic Athenians, who first argued and debated about man’s inherent nature and how best that nature can be controlled by rational actors (i.e., princes and legislators).
In the second book of the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus press Socrates with a challenge that has never quite been answered.
Every moral panic appears as a fait accompli from the inside and inexplicable from the outside. The magistrates of Salem required nothing beyond spectral evidence to hang nineteen of their neighbors, and within five years the colony’s own ministers were ashamed of the proceedings.