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The frontispiece of Leviathan was engraved by Abraham Bosse after my instructions. It shows the Sovereign — a giant figure composed of hundreds of individual human bodies — holding a sword and a crozier, towering above a landscape of towns and churches. The people who compose the sovereign's body are all facing inward, toward him. They have given up their individual wills in exchange for protection.

This is not a fantasy. This is what authority is. The alternative — which I had witnessed in the English Civil War, which killed forty thousand men in battle and many more through disease and displacement — is the state of nature: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. People prefer order to freedom when they have experienced genuine disorder. I had. I was drawing from life.