ABSTRACT
Behind the psychological problems presented by public opinion operating in a complicated world, there is an important history of psychological interpretations of human nature and politics. Thomas Hobbes is credited by C. H. Driver with beginning in his Leviathan, in 1651, psychological political speculation in England. He presented a doctrine of the association of ideas to explain both the content of the individual mind and the selfish motives animating political behavior. It was a doctrine of struggle, an evolutionary conception, a kind of natural selection of ideas of an unsocial nature. To suppose that the social contract arose as a catalytic agent which precipitated social impulses from antisocial behavior was indeed a weak hypothesis. How did man really become social if he is in origin a creature in a perpetual war of all against all, as Hobbes pictures him?
