The Leviathan: a monarchy or other government authority that embodies

the will of the people and has a monopoly on the use of force. By
inflicting penalties on aggressors, the Leviathan can eliminate their
incentive for aggression, in turn defusing general anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating everyones need to maintain a hair trigger
for retaliation to prove their resolve. And because the Leviathan is a
disinterested third party, it is not biased by the chauvinism that makes
each side think its opponent has a heart of darkness while it is as pure as
the driven snow.
The logic of the Leviathan can be summed up in a triangle: In every act of
violence, there are three interested parties: the aggressor, the victim,
and a bystander. Each has a motive for violence: the aggressor to prey
upon the victim, the victim to retaliate, the bystander to minimize
collateral damage from their fight. Violence between the combatants may
be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be
called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than
war. Hobbess theory makes a testable prediction about the history of
violence. The Leviathan made its first appearance in a late act in the
human pageant. Archaeologists tell us that humans lived in a state of
anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago,
when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and
developed the first governments. If Hobbess theory is right, this
transition should also have ushered in the first major historical decline in
violence. Before the advent of civilization, when men lived without a
common power to keep them all in awe, their lives should have been

nastier, more brutish, and shorter than when peace was imposed on them
by armed authorities, a development I will call the Pacification process.
Hobbes claimed that savage people in many places in America lived in a
state of violent anarchy, but he gave no specifics as to whom he had in
mind.
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of

Violence and Humanity

Leviathan - A metaphor for the state, the Leviathan is described as an

artificial person whose body is made up of all the bodies of its citizens,
who are the literal members of the Leviathan's body. The head of the
Leviathan is the sovereign. The Leviathan is constructed through
contract by people in the state of nature in order to escape the horrors of
this natural condition. The power of the Leviathan protects them from
the abuses of one another.
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Sparknotes