ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in 1588, his mother’s labour, it is said, being brought on by news of the Armada, but he survived all the vicissitudes of seventeenth-century English politics to die in his bed at the age of ninety-one in 1679. Hobbes was a staunch Royalist. Hobbes spent some of his time in exile in France as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II. The basis of Hobbes’s argument can be stated simply, though the implications of that argument are far-reaching. Social contract almost always imagined what things must have been like at the beginning before Civil Society, that is society and the state, existed. Hobbes calls the preservation of life the Right of Nature. Hobbes calls the State of Nature a state of war, because it is in the nature of war that there will be intervals between the fighting.
