The State of Nature Hobbes took this view of mankind and imagined a time when there was no effective government. He thought that without strong government “the wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud”. The result is that everyone battles with everyone else for every small advantage. It is, in effect, a war of all against all. Hobbes called this imagined pre-history the “state of nature”.
