| In English, 'society' - initially in [a
generic sense] - was first used in the sixteenth century. We find
Hobbes using this sense in the famous passage in Leviathan where he sees
'no account of time; no Arts; no Letters;
no Society; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'.
... Leviathan is, of course, an argument to justify the absolutist
state.
John D.Y. Peel, in: Ingold 1990, p.12 |