“The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”Thomas Hobbes · Leviathan · 1651 · Partea I, capitolul 13
Peace is not virtue but a calculation of passions: fear, need and hope.
Hobbes does not believe people are naturally drawn to the good; three practical motives pull them away from violence. Fear of death makes fighting risky, the need for food and shelter demands a stable setting, and the hope that labor pays better than plunder makes trade preferable to theft. The mechanism is simple: peace is the product of a calculation among passions, not of virtue. A farmer leaves his neighbor's field alone not from morality, but because the harvest is worth more than what he could take from it.
If peace comes from calculation, not virtue, then it is fragile wherever the calculation changes. Hobbes suggests that a peaceful person can turn aggressive as soon as the ratio between work and plunder flips. Think of a neighborhood where shops close early because thieves risk little and shopkeepers earn less and less. When robbing seems safer than selling, people do not become wicked; they simply recalculate. From here follows a practical question: what makes an environment reliably reward peaceful work?
Why it matters The idea still matters in political and economic thinking: stable institutions last precisely where citizens gain more from peaceful work than from conflict.