In fairness, a less invested portrait of Petty could call him a very fortunate character as easily. Petty was a music professor before being apprenticed to the brilliant Thomas Hobbes of Oxford and Cambridge University. Petty arrived upon Laissez-faire's competing view of economics at a time of great opportunity and growth in a fledgling expanding British Empire. "Laissez-faire" policies stood in direct contrast to his supervisor Hobbes' Social Contract, developed based on Hobbes' experiences during the greatest depression in Britain's history The General Crisis. To afford some context, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's experiences during the Great Depression of 1930, prompted him to create the Second Bill of Rights similarly.