Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

As an English philosopher and monarchist, Thomas Hobbes asked why people allow themselves to be subjected to the rule of a king. Contrary to the tacit explanation at the time that monarchs were ordained by God, Hobbes searched for an explanation in natural law for this social phenomenon. He produced one of the first secular explanations of authority in "the social contract", which would become a tradition in political philosophy and the fundamental line of thought for what we refer to as liberalism today.

The Social Contract
The "social contract" is Hobbes' idea that, based on the premise that "life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," people agree to surrender their own will to that of an authoritative leader in order to be more civilized, or less animal. By the same token, the social contract implies that monarchic power derives from representing the interests of the general population, which resonates with what we think of as "democracy" today.