Thomas Hobbes
Without a state, life would be solitary, brutish and short.
Misconceptions
For Hobbes, man is wicked by nature.
He expressly denies that men are wicked "by nature". Leaning on Scripture, he grants that perhaps all men are wicked, but not through a defect of their nature. Our desires and passions are not sins, and his thesis does not require the wicked to be many: it is enough that we cannot tell them from the others for everyone to have to be on guard. The wicked man, he says, is "a robust child": someone lacking reason and education.
"Man is a wolf to man" is Hobbes's phrase.
The proverb is old: it is found in the Latin poet Plautus. Hobbes quotes it in the dedication of De Cive, but to balance it: "man is a god to man" between fellow citizens, "a wolf" between states.
Hobbes defended absolute monarchy, and so tyranny.
He defends absolute, undivided power, but that power can belong to a king or to an assembly: "the Power in all formes... is the same". He prefers monarchy, without making it a condition. And even a justly condemned subject keeps the liberty to disobey an order to kill himself or not to resist.
Hobbes believed the state of nature really existed everywhere in the past.
He writes that he does not believe it was ever generally so, over all the world. The state of nature is above all a hypothesis: what life would be without a common power. To picture it, he points to civil wars.
Hobbes was an atheist.
He was often accused of it, and his ideas (everything is body, religion serving the state) fed the suspicion. But he states that the search for causes leads to a first eternal cause, which men call God, even if it stays incomprehensible. What he really believed is still debated.