Much of one’s view of human history, past and present, is dependent on whether one accepts Hobbes’s view of it or Rousseau’s. Rousseau, setting the course for “liberals” of all kinds, and for optimists and revolutionaries of every stamp, wrote: “Man is born free, and everywhere is in chains.” Hobbes on the contrary declared the conservative and pessimistic view of the human past and future: that far from being “born free” the condition of man in his natural state was “… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and that without the civilizing effect of the great institutions of the state there would be “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continued fear and danger of violent death.”
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