Thomas Hobbes

Writing through the English Civil War, Hobbes asked what life would be like with no common power to keep people in awe, and answered that it would be a war of all against all, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Leviathan (1651) concludes that rational people would authorise a sovereign with near-absolute power in exchange for security. Every later argument about why we accept authority, and how much, starts by agreeing or disagreeing with chapter 13.