Hobbes
He did politics the way Euclid did geometry: start from the bare facts of what a human being is, and prove the rest. The bare fact, for Hobbes, was that a person is matter in motion, a needy machine that wants above all to go on living. Strip the state away and those machines tear each other apart, because each has good reason to strike first. So reason itself drives them to hand all their power to one overwhelming sovereign, the Leviathan, and almost never to take it back. The most frightening conclusion in political philosophy (obey, nearly without limit, because the one thing worse than tyranny is the war that has no tyrant) was built by a timid man who watched his country come apart and decided that order was the only thing worth proving.
