Before moving on to the theory of Thomas Hobbes social contract, we have to ask ourselves the question that, why do we need government? And evaluate the pros and cons of Government. For instance, if we don’t have government we have complete liberty of doing whatever we want to do. We will have liberty to speech, religion, owning property, movement, confiscating others property and punishing others if a person or group have power to do so. There will be no interference of government in choosing our religion, stopping an individual from saying anything, owning and confiscating property, moving from one place to another and punishing others for whatever reason you have for punishing him or maybe without any reason.
The above statement sounds good to everyone, however, if we think that, not only you have all those mentioned liberties but all the individuals will be entitled to those liberties. If you are not powerful others may confiscate your property and might punish you without any reason or inflict harm upon you.
So does it sounds good now? Obviously not; Thomas Hobbes believe that human in law of nature is cruel and selfish he/she will do anything for his/her personal gain. If there isn’t any common authority, every individual will be in war with one another. So without government there would be unrest and chaos in the society. There would be no proof of who owns what? And what belongs to whom? Thomas Hobbes writes in his book leviathan (1651) that, there should be very strong centralized government to prevent the chaos and unrest in the society. The word leviathan is adopted from Old Testament, which is a Hebrew word means, sea monster. He believed that, in order to control the people in society, government should be like a sea monster. According to Hobbes if people needs safety and security from government they have to sacrifices some of their liberties. This agreement between government and people is refer to as social contract.
