The hobbesian state of nature: A prisoner's dilemma?

In his 1651 work Leviathan, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argues in favor of a societal structure in which individuals must waive a portion of their natural rights to an “artificial man” in order to avoid battling with each other. Most famously, Hobbes declared that this condition of war was the “default scenario” that ought to be expected among humans in a government-less “state of nature,” based on scientific principles of motion and matter which hold true in the workings of the human mind. As if through inertia, humans continue to desire additional resources (both tangible and symbolic) after they have fulfilled their basic needs, making it only a matter of time until multiple lines of human desire converge upon the same finite resource and some of the lines are fatally severed. However, through a unique grasp of symbolic language and gestures, humans have the capacity to create social contracts which rescue their creators from the physical and psychological terrors of struggling to survive in the state of nature.

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