Equality as potential murderers underwrites the need for the state

Evidence

Hobbes points out that in the struggle for power, as in their native capacities for power, all men are equal; for the equality of men is based on the fact that each has by nature enough power to kill another. Weakness can be compensated for by guile. Their equality as potential murderers places all men in the same insecurity, from which arises the need for a state. The raison d’être of the state is the need for some security of the individual, who feels himself menaced by all his fellow-men. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 382

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s account of Hobbesian equality as grounded in mutual lethal capacity, producing the insecurity that calls the state into being.