Hobbes’ political theories were, in a sense, entirely founded on the concept of risk, or danger, although he does not exactly express himself in those terms. Or from another point of view, his position can be seen as the just war theory writ small, in which the actors are individual persons instead of states, though he does not use precisely those terms either. The famous phrase in Leviathan about the life of man in a state of nature being “nasty, brutish, and short” occurs in a paragraph that attributes that condition to lack of certainty about the effects of actions. “In such condition,
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