Macpherson continues to describe Hobbes' commonwealth as a society in which "the natural relations of men are those in which each is reduced to equality of status and struggles against the others for recognition and material satisfactions. .
A man's worth is what other will give for his power; society is reduced to the market." In his article, Macpherson, attempts to reveal the critical issues behind Hobbes' thoughts about the bourgeois society and that his work helps to describe the inevitable collapse of the bourgeois man. A society in which all men try and fight their way to the top leaves little room for us to build a society that can be sustainable because a society in which we are constantly competing with one another is a society that is always at war. How can a society that has no moderation imposed upon its citizens and allows for this type of relentless competition possibly survive? Macpherson shows us that Hobbes has merely taken the intense competition that is present in the state of nature and restricted that brutal race to the top within his Commonwealth, showing us that in Hobbes' Leviathan we may not be better off in this society because it will inevitably collapse under the immense pressure of its citizens having to compete so heavily for what it is they desire. .
In Peter Hayes' article, "The Bourgeois Moderation," we are presented with the argument that Macpherson and other scholars' error in the thinking that Hobbes transfers the intense competition of the state of nature into the commonwealth. Hayes argues that Hobbes did indeed prescribe a plan to limit competition between the citizens of his society, and this can be seen through three different methods. First being the insistence of the natural equality of all people in the commonwealth, second, by including maxims of moderation as part of the laws of nature, and lastly, by emphasizing the need to avoid war except as a last resort.
