Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms in return for security. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to Covid-19 took that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.
