Hobbes: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short T-Shirt

Considered the father of Realism, Thomas Hobbes was a social contract theorist who broke ground with his theory of human nature described in his book Leviathan. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a "state of nature" that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.