Who argued in "leviathan" that the state was powerful because it represented the collective power given up by the people?

Answer;

Thomas Hobbes

Explanation;

-Hobbes believed that the only true and correct form of government was the absolute monarchy. He argued this most forcefully in his landmark work, Leviathan.

-This belief stemmed from the central tenet of Hobbes' natural philosophy that human beings are, at their core, selfish creatures. According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were; solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the social, or society.