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Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651).
The pure state of nature, or "the natural condition of mankind", was described by the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and his earlier work De Cive. [4]
Hobbes is explicit that in the state of nature nothing can be considered just or unjust, and every man must be considered to have a right to all things. [15] The second law of nature is that one ought to be willing to renounce one's right to all things where others are willing to do the same, to quit the state of nature, and to erect a ...
Aside from social contract theory, Leviathan also popularized ideas such as the state of nature ("war of all against all") and laws of nature. His other major works include the trilogy De Cive (1642), De Corpore (1655), and De Homine (1658) as well as the posthumous work Behemoth (1681).
Hobbes’s moral philosophy is the fundamental starting point from which his political philosophy is developed. This moral philosophy outlines a general conceptual framework on human nature which is rigorously developed in The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan. [5]
According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty).
The exact phrase "scientia potentia est" (knowledge is power) was written for the first time in the 1668 version of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, who was a secretary to Bacon as a young man. The related phrase "sapientia est potentia" is often translated as "wisdom is power". [1]
The essence of Hobbes' description is that the state of nature (or God's original creation) is one of war. In this state of nature , man's condition is defined as misery. Man draws upon "passions that incline men to peace and fear of death," as well as some limited form of natural reason to create and agree upon a convent in which there exists ...