It is very rare for a modern British prime minister to have heard of a 17th-century philosopher, let alone to read one. So rare, indeed, that I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that Tony Blair had cited “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651, in a speech he gave on Tuesday. In a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with Muslims, Mr. Blair once revealed that his bedside reading included the Koran. If it is true that he has now put away the Prophet and instead dozes off with the incomparable prose of “Leviathan” ringing in his ears, that is good news.

Mr. Blair mentioned Hobbes as he was launching his “Respect Action Plan,” which is intended to “eradicate the scourge of anti-social behaviour and restore Respect to the communities of Britain.” The prime minister’s “respect agenda” has been greeted with a mixture of derision on the right and indignation on the left. Conservatives dismiss his initiatives, including the forced eviction of anti-social families from their homes, as “gimmicks”, yet more laws that will never be enforced. Liberals accuse him of creating a police state, trampling on liberty and the rule of law.

But if Mr. Blair knows his Hobbes, then his proposals make some sort of sense. The most famous passage in “Leviathan” describes the state of nature in the absence of authority: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

That is a pretty accurate description of life in some of Britain’s inner cities today. It has taken Mr. Blair a long time – nearly nine years, in fact – to wake up to the consequences of the breakdown of what his party used to sneer at as “Victorian values,” but it is better late than never. And his solution is the same as Hobbes’s: a social contract between the individual and the community. Respect is one name for the tribute paid to authority in return for security.

For the sake of security, people are prepared to sacrifice a good deal: personal liberty, property rights, life itself. Mr. Blair’s Respect agenda, including on-the-spot fines and anti-social behavior orders, is mild indeed compared to the measures Hobbes and his contemporaries tolerated to bring an end to the English Civil War.

In the Palace of Westminster, you can still see the death warrant for King Charles I, signed by Oliver Cromwell and the other “regicides.” Regicide, the killing of the Lord’s anointed, was the ultimate offense against 17th-century morality – yet it was done, and by quasi-judicial process too, not in the name of liberty but in the name of security. Several names on the death warrant have been scratched out, because at the Restoration the surviving regicides were themselves hunted down and some tried to deny their role.

After the London bombings last year, Mr. Blair failed to persuade Parliament to grant the police the right to hold terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without trial. But he or his successor will get those powers, and any others they think requisite, once Britons really fear for their lives. Such fear does not have to be provoked by terrorism. France is still living under a state of emergency, which gives the authorities much wider powers than Mr. Blair is seeking, as a result of last November’s rioting by Muslim youths. Some British cities are nearly as volatile as their French counterparts.

“Respect” was, however, an unfortunate choice of word by Mr. Blair for his program. It has been tarnished by the very gang culture that has made such drastic measures necessary. Most recently, it has been usurped by the man who embodies Britain at its worst: George Galloway, leader of the Respect Party.

Readers may recall just how much respect Mr. Galloway showed the United States Senate when he was summoned before its sub-committee to account for large sums that had, according to documents disclosed by the United Nations oil-for-food investigation, been paid to him by the Baathist regime. He is a sycophant of Saddam, Castro, Arafat, and other despots, who has incited terrorists to attack Coalition troops in Iraq, and those troops to mutiny. It is hardly surprising that such a man is lacking in respect for the institutions of democracy, including the Parliament of which he is a member.

But “Gorgeous” George’s latest stunt has made gorges rise. While Mr. Blair was symbolically cleaning graffiti off a wall, Mr. Galloway has spent the last week taking part in a TV reality show called “Celebrity Big Brother,” along with a transvestite and assorted exhibitionists. Even he was taken aback by the squalor of public conversations over breakfast “which involve every orifice and every fluid known to man.”

Watching their Member of Parliament in such company, the people of Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End must be wishing they still had his half-black, half-Jewish, and wholly respectable predecessor, Oona King, as their representative, even though she supported the war in Iraq. Mr. Galloway makes a mockery of democracy, like some grinning gargoyle on the gothic edifices of Westminster.

The spectacle of collapsing internal authority in the West is not lost on enemies of Judeo-Christian civilization, who promptly defy external authority, too. Iran dropped any pretense of complying with the authority of the international community this week in its eagerness to acquire nuclear weapons. The United States has broad support for a referral to the U.N. Security Council, but much less for sanctions, let alone military action. Meanwhile, Europe is still casting about for new ways of appeasing the Ahmadinejad regime. Mr. Blair is the only European leader who seems to have grasped that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as implacable as he is fanatical.

That brings us back to Hobbes. The central thesis of “Leviathan” is that mankind without respect for authority speedily reverts to chaos: “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.” In the world of 2006, that common power is the United States and its allies. If we do not keep the Islamists in awe, the result will be war. And we shall not keep our external enemies in awe unless we do the same to our enemies within.