The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Hobbes was doing much the same thing when he wrote in Leviathan that the primordial state of human society would necessarily have been a ‘Bellum omnium contra omnes ’, a war of all against all, which could only be overcome by the creation of an absolute sovereign power. He wasn’t saying there had actually been a time when everyone lived in such a primordial state. Some suspect that Hobbes’s state of war was really an allegory for his native England’s descent into civil war in the mid seventeenth century, which drove the royalist author into exile in Paris. Whatever the case, the closest Hobbes himself came to suggesting this state really existed was when he noted how the only people who weren’t under the ultimate authority of some king were the kings themselves, and they always seemed to be at war with one another.