War & Peace Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Strip away the state and Hobbes doesn’t picture a pastoral return to nature; he pictures a vacuum that instantly fills with threat. The phrase "common power" is doing the heavy lifting: it’s not just government as paperwork, but an authority capable of making consequences feel inevitable. His clincher, "to keep them all in awe", is brutally candid about the emotional engine of order. Awe here isn’t reverence. It’s fear with a civic job description.

Hobbes is writing in the shadow of the English Civil War, when sovereign legitimacy wasn’t an abstract seminar topic but a daily question of who could protect you, tax you, or kill you. That context explains the quote’s severity: it’s a diagnostic statement from someone watching institutions collapse in real time. The subtext is a warning to readers tempted by romantic anti-authoritarianism. Remove the referee and you don’t get freedom; you get permanent suspicion, preemptive strikes, and defensive hoarding. Even "war" is widened beyond battles to a condition: a continual readiness to fight because no one can reliably guarantee anyone else’s restraint.

The rhetorical move is universalizing and leveling. "Every man against every man" turns conflict into a default setting, not an exception, and it flattens moral distinctions into strategic ones. Hobbes isn’t claiming people are cartoonishly evil; he’s arguing that without enforcement, even reasonable people are pushed into worst-case behavior. His intent is political: to justify a strong sovereign as the price of peace, and to make that price feel cheaper than the alternative.