... embrace Hobbes and accept his theories, will be examined. Hobbes could, perhaps, be described as a 'child of his time'. He lived through the social chaos of the English civil war, which gave him much opportunity to observe the conflictual side of man's nature. His prescription for society, contained within Leviathan, was based on what he believed makes man a conflictual animal. This prescription was directed towards creating a society that allowed for this basic conflictual nature of man and yet would permit people to live in relative peace and security. Hobbes considered himself a scientific man3, and borrowed methods of reasoning from Galileo.4 He believed that the principle of perpetual motion (another of Galileo's influences) could be used as a basis for explaining how and why men acted as they did.5 Hobbes' method consisted of breaking down the actions of men to the 'simple' movements of the body and then postulating ...

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