ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Thomas Hobbes who was born in Malmesbury in 1588 and educated at Oxford University, which at that time was a centre of nominalistic Scholasticism. Hobbes' interest in classical studies resulted in the translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars in 1629, in which Hobbes read of perils of civil war. Chronic anarchy amounts to the Hobbesean predicament, as identified in the most powerful of English texts in political theory: Leviathan. The chapter discusses that huge information source on the modern state, covering more than 200 governments in the early twenty-first century in order to show how the democracy-dictatorship distinction relates to aspects of political instability. The World Bank has taken a much-needed initiative when funding a big research project upon the modern state. The unique feature of the Pacific Islands states is that there are indigenous societies facing the difficult task of transforming their tribal communities into viable nation-states.
