This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan against the backdrop of the English Civil War, and it shows: the book's argument is best understood as a sustained case that civil war, faction and the collapse of common authority are the worst thing that can happen to a people, worse by far than submitting to a ruler with more power than anyone finds comfortable. His state of nature is not primarily a historical claim about primitive humanity so much as a diagnosis of what happens whenever a common power capable of enforcing agreements disappears, which a civil war does in practice regardless of how civilized the people caught in it were the week before. Without a common power, Hobbes argues, no agreement can be trusted to hold, because each party has reason to fear the other will break it first and strike while ahead, which makes even naturally peaceable people rationally driven to preemptive hostility. The only remedy is a sovereign whose power to punish breach is credible enough that keeping agreements becomes the safer bet than breaking them, and that credibility, Hobbes insists, requires the sovereign's power to be nearly absolute and effectively irrevocable; a sovereign subjects could unseat at will would face exactly the same problem the state of nature poses, nobody able to trust that today's peace holds tomorrow. This is why Leviathan reads less like an argument for tyranny for its own sake and more like an argument that the alternative, a return to a war of all against all, is so much worse that almost any stable authority is preferable to none. Locke and Rousseau, writing in calmer decades, could afford to worry about a sovereign's abuses in a way Hobbes, writing amid actual civil collapse, did not feel he could.