ABSTRACT
The logic of the right is that it is a right to self-preservation; it becomes, substantively, a right to all things because it depends on private judgment. The main thrust of Thomas Hobbes's argument throughout his moral and political writings is the necessity of making private judgment take second place to public judgment wherever the two come into conflict. Retention of the right to self-preservation seems to completely undermine the claims he makes for public judgment and the authority of the sovereign. The natural right to self-preservation is theoretically relevant and undermines Hobbes's claims about the necessity of giving supremacy to public judgment in our communal life. Given his argument about right reason, he seems to be stuck in the position of saying that we can live in civil society only if we alienate an inalienable right.
