Hobbes

Masters and men, according to Mr. Thornton, fatally confront each other in something like Hobbes’s misanthropically imagined state of nature, with nothing but force, or the fear of force in the background […]

The ideological gap between figures like Boehner and antagonists like Ted Cruz is not completely nonexistent; a world in which Boehner had unfettered power would have a radically smaller government, while a Cruz-topia would look more like Hobbes’s state of nature.

[…] Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau).