Parents control their children in the interests of the family, universities exercise control over professors and students, government exercises control over citizens, and religions control their adherents... Society's need for social control was stated most dramatically by Hobbes (1651/1958), who observed that in the "natural" state (without social control), as each person attempted to satisfy his/her individual needs and desires at the expense of others, humankind would be in a war of all against all, such that life would be "nasty, brutish, and short."

p. 161 - "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999