>It is also just not empirically true that people are
>equal in power in a state of nature as Hobbes holds
It doesn't make sense to you because you are _more individualist_ than Hobbes is. Hobbes does _not_ claim that all individuals, _taken as individuals_, are equal in power in the state of nature. He assumes that individuals can come together to make a collective even in the state of nature (unlike, for instance, Locke), and it is in part on this likelihood of the confederacy of the weak that he bases his argument regarding equality:
***** Nature hath made men equal, in the faculty of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself. *****
In other words, again, the guiding idea is violent death at the hands of others: even the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest; and weak individuals may enter into confederacy with others who are in the same danger and kill the strongest. Hence equality (without all being identical in the faculty of the body and mind). This is empirically true.
Yoshie