  Hobbes’s argument for the state is an argument from mutual advantage. We all benefit if there is a powerful state in place to regulate behavior, thereby enabling us to invest efforts in producing things to make our lives better and to enable us to exchange with each other without fear that others will wreck our efforts. Some scholars see this resolution as a matter of mutual cooperation in a grand prisoner’s dilemma. This is strategically or game theoretically wrong because putting a state in place is a matter of coordination on one or another sovereign, not a matter of exchange among us or between us and the sovereign. Once that state is in place, it might be true that I would rather free ride on the better behavior of my fellow citizens, who are generally law-abiding. But I generally cannot succeed in doing so, because there is police power to coerce me if necessary.