We have been discussing the nature of violence, and it is time to turn more directly to its moral assessment. Thomas Hobbes argued persuasively that the problem of violence lies at the heart of civil society. Hobbes thought that violence was endemic to human life and that in pre-civil or noncivil conditions (his “state of nature”) it created such miseries that reason required men to alienate, almost entirely, their natural right to self-protection in order to set up a sovereign with the sole right of the sword. In Hobbes's vision, the natural desire for self-preservation, and the peace that ensures it, will enable people to live together in security so long as they can be certain that there are workable violent sanctions to restrain and control those who break the peace or are tempted to do so. The solution to the awful problem posed by the widespread violence of the state of nature is to monopolise the potentiality for violence in the one agency.

There are many problems with Hobbes's picture of civil society and its title to legitimacy, just as there are many problems with his theory of human nature.