ABSTRACT
Like many other works of political philosophy written in the seventeenth century, Leviathan contains a description of the state of nature. This is a situation in which human beings have no government, no political institutions, and no executive forces such as a police force or army, in other words, it is a condition of anarchy. Thomas Hobbes' state of nature includes what modern philosophers might call descriptive and normative elements. The descriptive aspect tells us what life in the state of nature is or would be like. The normative aspect tells us what rights, obligations; laws and so on exist in the state of nature. By 'competition' Hobbes means that goods, things that people need to live at all, or to make life bearable or pleasant, are in relatively short supply in the state of nature.
