Can Peace Be Obtained Without A Government?

In his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell famously wrote that war was peace. It was only through perpetual conflict that Oceania was able to maintain internal security. Indeed, since the end of World War II the United States, through the expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex, seems to have taken this message to heart. While the second half of the 20th century was devoted to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the beginning of the 21st century has witnessed the rise of perpetual conflict with the amorphous Radical Islam. The United States, it seems, requires an enemy in order to both function as a coherent state and perpetuate economic spending. The question, then, becomes one of whether peace can be obtained without a government? Given that government seems to be in the state of continual conflict, would the world order be better without such interference? Is there an alternative in which peace can be obtained? By examining this question through the lens of Thomas Hobbes, largely through his Leviathan, it can be seen that, despite the massive military spending that sustains the United States, the natural inclinations of man would descend into utter chaos without the restraining hand of government.
The obvious definition is that peace is simply “the absence of war,” an idea that traces itself to the work of Thomas Hobbes (Polat 318). For Hobbes, the state was the collective, an “Artificiall Man…of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended” (Hobbes 9). Already Hobbes is intimating that government exists in order to protect human beings (Naturall [sic.] Man) from his fellow creatures. War then, can be defined as the natural state of human beings, and that peace is indeed the absence of war, a state of being impossible without the existence of