 Hobbes’s Leviathan is often regarded as the founding work in modern political philosophy, the text that began the continuing round of analyses of the function and justification of the state and its restrictions on individual liberties. The core of Hobbes’s reasoning can be given straightforwardly as follows. The best situation for all people is one in which each is free to do as she pleases. (One may or may not agree with this as a matter of psychology or ideology, but it is Hobbes’s assumption.) Often, such free people will wish to cooperate with one another in order to carry out projects that would be impossible for an individual acting alone. But if there are any immoral or amoral agents around, they will notice that their interests might at least sometimes be best served by getting the benefits from cooperation and not returning them. Suppose, for example, that you agree to help me build my house in return for my promise to help you build yours. After my house is finished, I can make your labour free to me simply by reneging on my promise. I then realize, however, that if this leaves you with no house, you will have an incentive to take mine. This will put me in constant fear of you, and force me to spend valuable time and resources guarding myself against you. I can best minimize these costs by striking first and killing you at the first opportunity. Of course, you can anticipate all of this reasoning by me, and so have good reason to try to beat me to the punch. Since I can anticipate this reasoning by you, my original fear of you was not paranoid; nor was yours of me. In fact, neither of us actually needs to be immoral to get this chain of mutual reasoning going; we need only think that there is some possibility that the other might try to cheat on bargains. Once a small wedge of doubt enters any one mind, the incentive induced by fear of the consequences of being preempted—hit before hitting first—quickly becomes overwhelming on both sides. If either of us has any resources of our own that the other might want, this murderous logic can take hold long before we are so silly as to imagine that we could ever actually get as far as making deals to help one another build houses in the first place. Left to their own devices, agents who are at least sometimes narrowly self-interested can repeatedly fail to derive the benefits of cooperation, and instead be trapped in a state of ‘war of all against all’, in Hobbes’s words. In these circumstances, human life, as he vividly and famously put it, will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”