Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) lived through some of the most turbulent periods of English history. He was born during the reign of Elizabeth I and lived to see the English Civil War brought to a conclusion. Hobbes was among the first of the Enlightenment philosophers to picture the universe as completely material and doubted that either heaven or God could be proved to exist outside the real world.

Following the ideas of his day, Hobbes was one of the first to present the human being as a machine with all its parts working together to exist in the material world. In fact, the material world itself was machinelike in its workings, or as he referred to it, "matter in motion." This mechanistic view of both human beings and the universe they inhabit heavily influenced his concept of how societies and governments were formed.

Hobbes believed that without society human beings would be living in a constant state of violent conflict over scarce resources—"a war of every man against every man." In his best-known book, Leviathan, he paints a dire picture of people without government in which individuals live a life in the shadow of violent death, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." His solution to this "state of nature" was the social contract.

Under this social contract, human beings would band together in a state of cooperation in which labor would be divided, and the amount of essential goods would increase and be equitably distributed. In order for this arrangement to work, there had to be a guarantee that people would not harm one another—they had to be free from fear of attack, theft, or treachery. And, they had to be able to rely on each other to keep their agreements. But Hobbes was not a "the glass is half-full" sort of person. He believed that although people would band together for self-protection and to better their chances of survival, they would not remain faithful to the contract very long without being forced. Why? Because people, even those living together in a social contract, are still self-interested. Ideally, people will cooperate because they know that their interests are affected not only by what they do but by what other people do as well. In other words, if everyone pursued his or her own self interests then they would all be worse off than if they worked together. However, Hobbes realized that even by using reason, people would still come to the conclusion that being self interested would be the best individual course to take.

The dilemma, however, is that if everyone chooses self interest, then we're back to a state of nature—and that is unacceptable. The answer is mutual cooperation overseen by a strong government. People must agree to the establishment of rules to govern their relations with one another, and to the formation of an agency (the government) with the power to enforce those rules. Hobbes held that such a government must have more power than any individual or any group in order to effectuate control over violations of the social contract. And, people would have only so much liberty themselves as they would allow to others. Hobbes, thus, made allowances for an individual or a group to govern (a sovereign or a legislature), as long as governance is for the good of all, not the governing body. However, above all else, Thomas Hobbes believed that government—any government—was better than social chaos.