The Leviathan. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes offered a justification of political authority by imagining what life would be like without it. In one of the most famous lines in the history of Western philosophy, Hobbes (in The Leviathan) described this “state of nature” as follows:
[During] the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe,
they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man
against every man . . . In such condition there is . . . continual fear and danger of