 The assumption that anarchy would be unhappy or unstable leads to justifications of political power. In Hobbes’ famous phrase, in the stateless—anarchic—condition of “the state nature” human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes’ social contract—as well as other versions of the social contract theory as found for example in Locke or Rousseau—are attempts to explain how and why the political state emerges from out of the anarchic state of nature.