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“and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Meaning & context
Hobbes describes the insecurity he believes follows where there is no common authority capable of restraining conflict and enforcing peace.
Source details
Leviathan, Part I, Chapter XIII, Project Gutenberg #3207. “And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” closes Hobbes’s list of consequences in the hypothetical condition where there is no common power able to keep people in awe. It remains a seventeenth-century political-philosophy argument about the state of nature, not a blanket empirical description of ordinary social life.