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.'