The movement to the modern period involves a return to a more active role for the populace. But it also involves a concern for limiting conflict and passions that can destabilize civil society. This produces a conflict between a fear that anger will threaten peaceful order and the conflicts over different views of injustice in the contest of politics. Thomas Hobbes provides a subtle elevation of a vision of society with minimal conflict, which requires not only a sovereign power, but an aggrandizing of passions that support peace and a suppression of those which lead to war. Adam Smith, in turn, offers suggestions that anger is necessary to support the enforcement of those laws and is involved in sympathy toward and on behalf of others. The hidden conflict between the two regarding these elements of their theories are fundamental in the construction of modern societies. Modern societies replace warfare and conflict with commerce and civility but they also inculcate burgeoning civil and political activity by common citizens involving the greater part of the populace, encouraging conflicts and partisan activity.