 We find similar ambiguities and tensions in what Hobbes says about race (or what we would now call race). On the one hand, he invokes the “savages” of the Americas to illustrate the “brutish” conditions of life in the state of nature. On the other hand, when he simply denies that there are innate or immutable differences between Native Americans and Europeans. Societies which have enjoyed scientific advancement have done so, according to Hobbes, because of the existence of “leisure time,” and if that is “supposed away,” he asks rhetorically, “what do we differ from the wildest of the Indians?”