War & Peace Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes isn’t describing a noisy battlefield so much as detonating a fantasy: the comforting belief that human beings, left alone, will naturally sort themselves into cooperation. “War of everyone against everyone” is engineered to sound absolute because it’s doing political work. It’s a pressure tactic. If the default setting of humanity is mutual threat, then the social contract stops being a lofty ideal and becomes emergency infrastructure.

The intent is less anthropology than argument. Hobbes writes Leviathan in the shadow of the English Civil War, when government isn’t an abstract civics lesson but a collapsing roof. His “condition of man” is the state of nature stripped of courts, police, and enforceable promises. In that vacuum, even decent people are forced into suspicion: you don’t need to be evil to preemptively arm yourself, hoard resources, or strike first; you just need to assume someone else might. The subtext is psychological and grimly modern: insecurity produces aggression, and rational self-interest can generate collective catastrophe.

The phrase also smuggles in a moral provocation. Hobbes refuses the romantic view that conflict is an unfortunate deviation from our true selves. Conflict is baked into the incentives of equal vulnerability. That bleakness is strategic: it makes sovereignty - a strong, central authority with a monopoly on force - feel like the only sane alternative. The rhetorical punch comes from its universality. “Everyone against everyone” leaves no outside, no innocent refuge. If you dislike the cure (a powerful state), Hobbes wants you to picture the untreated disease.