Leviathan (1651) was the masterpiece on political philosophy written by Thomas Hobbes to justify absolute sovereignty. Hobbes held that the greatest threat to human security was the anarchy of the ‘State of Nature’, and that to avoid that horrific condition, where life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, men must contract to establish a sovereign power with sufficient authority to enforce laws and maintain order.

A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.