Nevertheless, Hobbes did much to frame the way in which individuals relate to one another and to the state in
subsequent political theorizing, especially in the English-speaking world. Liberal theorists who followed him offered dramatically different visions of the appropriate scope of the state. They shared with Hobbes, however, a
basic sense of the problem for which the state is a solution. By and large, it is a framing of the political problem that remains part of the common sense of contemporary political discourse. That problem is the pervasive fact of individual vulnerability.