Thomas Hobbes Government Was Best If It Was Autocratic, An All-Powerful Sovereign

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that government was best if it was autocratic, an all-powerful sovereign. To understand Hobbes’s reasoning, it is crucial to first understand his view on man’s conditions in an anarchic environment. In Hobbes’ perspective, man’s life in the state of nature was “solid, poor, brutish, and short” because man is selfish and violent. Without institutions to provide security, man was always in a constant state of war. These anarchic conditions compel men to look after their own self-interest causing many problems to arise. Hobbes advocated for a monarchic government on the domestic state level because a society needed a central authority with sufficient power to provide rules for government and security. On the international level, Hobbes believed that the system was best when governed by one country.
Unlike Hobbes, philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that man in the state of nature had the capacity to be both good and evil. For this reason, Kant argued that government on the domestic level would be best represented by a more democratic form of government, because men will choose to make good decisions in most cases.
In the international realm, states will inevitably seek a balance of power. When a number of weaker states are threatened by a coalition of stronger states, they join forces, establish a formal alliance, and seek to persevere their own independence by checking the power of the opposing side. Balance of power seeks to ensure the equilibrium of power in which case no one state is in a position to dominate all the others. The aims of the Balance of Power Theory is to preserve the independence and survival of individual nation-states, preserve the state system, and prevent any one state from dominating the system. The means to achieve this is through vigilance, alliance, reciprocal communication, intervention, and