The only issue here is that conservative and liberalism are confused by your explanation.

By themselves, liberal means a loosening of standards and control and whatnot, what conservative means opposing change and holding on to the status quo. At the time of Hobbes, the status quo for a long time had been absolutism and a powerful monarch, so by arguing in favor of the "leviathan" as he termed his ideal head of state, he was supporting a retention of, or return to the absolutist practices from which others sought to break away or reform. John Locke was a liberal in the sense that he believed in a reduction of government and argued for freedom and natural rights. These positions, out of context, would today reverse their political labels. Through the 20th century, or at least since World War One, conservatism has been about halting the growth of government, and at this point, the ideal of conservatives is NOT to retain current practices or turn back the clock slightly - rather the goal or ideal is a radical withdrawal of years of increasing government. There really are no genuine "conservatives" according to the literal meaning of the word, aside from some centrists who are (rather surprisingly) accurately labled as conservatives, but scorned by others sharing that label as "neo-con" or "RINO(Republican In Name Only)". The so-called "far right" or "extreme conservative fringe" calls for massive reductions in government spending and regulation, and claim to be ideological descendants of Locke & Edmund Burke (who has been termed "the father of modern conservatism" ). In the American political system, they are also called "strict constructionists" for subscribing to a limited & literal interpretation of the Constitution of the US, which was created by men who were adherents to the philosophies of John Locke, Adam Smith & the French physiocrats. Their conservatism is either a misnomer, as they do not actually want to conserve anything of the government in living memory, or pinpoints their ideal of a political system from over 230 years ago.

By contrast, liberals claim the term generally due to a certain permissiveness on social or so-called "moral" issues and a liberalizing of traditional standards and mores. When it comes to government, they heartily espouse the expansion of government power into all sorts of spheres of activity and absorption of certain perceived necessities into government activity in order to ensure those necessities. They DO favor the creation of a Hobbesian Leviathan in order to solve those problems they perceive, such as uneven or inequal distribution of resources, exploitation of social, economic or material advantages to the detriment of the greater good, and potential environmental, social or economic crises they perceive as imminent or catastrophic.

Also, as many others seem to allude, the terms "left" & "right" used to describe certain ends of the political spectrum are holdovers from the French Revolution, which can be misleading as well, since the circumstances of that country differed a great deal from the near-contemporaneous "revolution" of the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Edmund Burke was a supporter of the latter and opposed the former on political principles, despite the American movement resulting in armed revolt against the Britain he served in Parliament, and the French Revolution overthrowing a monarchy that frequently had fought wars against Britain, including one by the then-reigning king. There were also many Americans who were strongly opposed to the French Revolution despite being at the forefront of the American Revolution, and the two countries actually fought an undeclared naval war in the waning years of the 18th century, under a US president who had served as an ambassador to France. In the meantime, the French revolutionary government erected a shrine to Benjamin Franklin in the Cathedral of Notre Dame (of Hunchback fame). As should be obvious, there is a great deal of mistranslation and change between the origins of certain political terms and their contemporary useage.

For the most part, liberal & left are used more or less synonymously, while conservative and right are generally also taken to mean the same thing, but the actual meaning of those polarities as translated into policy positions varies greatly from country to country. For instance, the "right" and conservatism is generally identified with anti-communism (to the extent that even groups whose policies would generally be described as liberal have been historically identified as "right-wing" or "rightist" based solely on their conflicts with communist parties or governments), but in Taiwan, the right is generally favorable to communist China while the otherwise liberal left is more opposed. One possible reason for this is that their adherence to tradition and historically-established values and mores leads them to sympathize with China, the mother country of that culture, regardless of the current form of government, while the left, which keeps to the liberal definition by seeking to ameliorate traditional influences, rejects the cultural deference to the greater Chinese nation.

There are other differences in other countries, usually predicated on how far along a sliding scale from conservative to communist a nation's political system might be placed. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, the "right" were the hardline communists who supported the state above individual freedoms and the central authority over local or national authority. By contrast, in the USA, the "right" has USUALLY favored local authority over central government, and individual or state rights over national rights. One point that underlies this difference is the meaning of the term "national" as applied to the USSR & the USA. The former consisted of several more or less ethnically homogenous nations ("nation" being defined for this comparison as a group of people with shared language and culture and usually ethnicity as well), some of which had been independant & sovereign states in the past, and whose people aspired to it in the future. Thus for the USSR, "national" meant on the level below the USSR - it meant pertaining to Ukraine or Lithuania or Azerbaijan, and thus a strong nationalist was one who favored the local identity and authorities over the central authorities. By contrast in the USA, which in theory is a union of several sovereign & independant states ("state" being defined here as a political entity with a government and established boundaries and de jure sovereignty), but each composed largely of people who shared language & cultural values with each other, the "nation" of people extended beyond the borders of any particular state, and encompassed the whole of the union. The same general situation could be said to apply to pre-20th century Germany, though there was less of a political union there (at least until 1871) and multiple independant German states. So in the USA or Germany, "national" referred to the unified whole, as opposed to the USSR, where it referred to a subordinate component. A nationalist in the USA would be a patriot of the USA, but not of his state (and some might consider him a traitor to his state, particularly in the South), while in the USSR a nationalist would be a patriot of Ukraine or Georgia and considered a traitor to the Soviet Union.

All of this goes to show that you can't simply hope for a simple or definitive meaning for a term used to describe a political position. None of what I said above even takes into account the relativity of a political position. As Ann Coulter once wrote "As far as I'm concerned, I'm a middle of the road moderate and everyone else is a crazy extremist." Coulter is generally considered to belong to the far-right by US standards, yet a strong trend of political libertarianism is cropping up among the American right, that would consider Coulter to be somewhat to the left, and not far removed from John McCain, the most recent presidential candidate from the "right" party, whom Coulter has derided as a liberal. It all depends on where you are standing.