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What was happening in England during the time that Hobbes developed his theories about government?

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Final answer:

Hobbes developed his theories in the midst of the English Civil War, a time of chaotic conflict that profoundly influenced his support for a strong centralized authority and social contract to maintain societal peace and order.

Step-by-step explanation:

During the time when Thomas Hobbes developed his theories about government, England was experiencing the English Civil War, a period of extreme upheaval and conflict. Outside the philosophical realm, this turmoil was characterized by struggles between absolutism and parliamentarianism, the beheading of a king, the brief rule of a dictator, Oliver Cromwell, and the eventual establishment of a constitutional monarchy under William and Mary who signed the English Bill of Rights. Hobbes himself had witnessed the horrors of the war and thus conceived a political theory that justified strong, centralized authority, encapsulated in his notion of the social contract and the need for a Leviathan - a powerful ruler - to maintain peace and prevent the chaos of the natural state of mankind, which he famously described as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'

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