ABSTRACT
Intellectual historians have hardly ever questioned the sudden rupture caused in political thought by Thomas Hobbes and his writings. Hobbes's starting point is that all humans are more or less equal in physical strength and intellectual powers. In the Hobbesian state of nature, there are no effective moral principles which can be enforced – there is no assurance of reciprocal compliance because anyone could turn into a free-rider and abuse the trust and gullibility of others. Pufendorf is an interesting example of an author writing in the shadow of Leviathan: partly following Hobbes. For the hardliners endorsing the domestic analogy, nothing short of the global Leviathan will do. Christian Wolff shrinks back from this idea. Wolff is mostly known for his role in pre-Kantian metaphysics, and as the target of Kant's devastating criticism. For Wolff, Chinese philosophy demonstrated that there was a transcultural natural morality available to any reasonable human being without the help of divine revelation.
