Hobbes begins with the state of nature. For him, this is a condition of unconstrained aggression and ubiquitous vulnerability. The result is not pleasant. “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe,” he wrote, “they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.”68 On Hobbes’s view, there is no individual escape from the state of war. No one person is so overwhelmingly strong or clever to long dominate his fellows unaided.69 Accordingly, without some exit from the state of nature,
mankind is doomed to an existence that is, in the famous phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”70 Hobbes’s solution is Leviathan, a collective person formed by an initial social contract and endowed with overwhelming coercive capacity. The result is a transition from a situation of ubiquitous exposure to attack to one in which each individual is essentially invulnerable except to the actions of the sovereign.