Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates some of the implications of Thomas Hobbes's right reason argument. It provides its implications for the liberty of the citizen and the idea of natural rights. The book examines various ways in which Hobbes might try to explain this inalienable right and maintain his thesis about public and private judgment. It discusses the conditions that Hobbes believed necessary for contracts to be binding and explores the role of the sovereign, who is the form taken by convention in his argument, in making them binding. The book explains the way in which even those aspects of morality that are not directly conventional require a background of convention if they are to be effective. It considers the way in which the sovereign is supposed to interpret the laws of nature and how they are to be understood.