... was born into a tumultuous era of political and scientific change. An Oxford education and his short exile during the civil war revealed to him the significance of these changes and it became an obsession of his work to link the two movements. His observation of the civil war and the English Republic especially led him to design a state where "eternal" peace could arise on the back of education and the unchallenged rule of the sovereign, the Leviathan. It sets out first to explore the nature of humans and their behaviour without a state and then sets forth in an attempt to design a system of good government in which peace would flourish. History of the Peloponnesian War however does not make strong statements, in its purest form it is merely a historical observation of the wars between Athens and Sparta (˜431-411BC). However, for Thucydides it was "not a ...

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