I agree with your opinion of the phrase’s use here. Hobbes was talking about more than “no guarantees” though; he was referring to a life outside of society. The rest of this comment is about that, and tangential to the topic at hand.
He was working from the axiom that laws are what create societies, that “nature” without laws makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s interesting how the first two are almost always dropped, isn’t it?
Anyway, this is a false premise. Nature abounds with examples of cooperation at the same rate as those of competition, from communal species banding together to mutualistic interspecies relationships. We keep finding more and more of them. My own suspicion is that what we find in nature broadly reflects our own ideals, because those are simply what we are most likely to look for, and so Hobbes’ society reflected more nastiness than ours does today.
