No more comprehensive, tightly structured, and closely argued political philosophy exists than Hobbes set out in Leviathan. It shocks our conventional assumptions, and it is disquieting. For the sake of peace and order, religion cannot be allowed the political power and conscientious authority it has often claimed. To cure our political ills and contain the state of war we may have to submit to governments we thoroughly dislike. The most prevalent and powerful human traits of human nature are unpleasant and socially destructive. It is this insight which touches a raw nerve of truth with so many readers. Modern man, if not all mankind, is ominously close to Hobbes's account of us—competitive, acquisitive, possessive, restless, individualistic, self-concerned, and insatiable in our demands for whatever we see in isolation as our own good. It is this point of realism which almost all other political philosophies underestimate, and which Hobbes gets memorably right in his great endeavour to deliver us from a life consistent with our own natures, and of our own making; a life which would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.