Latin: Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). The common modern English usage is a war of "each against all" where war is rare and terms such as "competition" or "struggle" are more common.[1]
In Leviathan itself,[2] Hobbes speaks of 'warre of every one against every one',[3] of 'a war [...] of every man against every man'[4] and of 'a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour',[2] [5] but the Latin phrase occurs in De Cive:
Later on, two slightly modified versions are presented in De Cive:
In chapter XIII of Leviathan,[6] Hobbes explains the concept with these words:
The thought experiment places people in a pre-social condition, and theorizes what would happen in such a condition. According to Hobbes, the outcome is that people choose to enter a social contract, giving up some of their liberties in order to enjoy peace. This thought experiment is a test for the legitimation of a state in fulfilling its role as "sovereign" to guarantee social order, and for comparing different types of states on that basis.
Hobbes distinguishes between war and battle: war does not only consist of actual battle; it points to the situation in which one knows there is a 'Will to contend by Battle'.[7]
In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson uses the phrase Latin: label=none|bellum omnium in omnia ("war of all things against all things", assuming Latin: label=none|omnium is intended to be neuter like Latin: label=none|omnia) as he laments that the constitution of that state was twice at risk of being sacrificed to the nomination of a dictator after the manner of the Roman Republic.[8]
The phrase was sometimes used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
The English translation eliminates the Latin phrase used in the original German.[9]
It was also used by Friedrich Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873):