ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates Hobbes's understanding of the Prisoner's Dilemma structure of contracting and exchange. It lays out the structure of Hobbes's theory with its potentially misleading dual focus on the laws of nature and the laws of a sovereign. The political theory of Hobbes is variously seen as a forerunner of both utilitarianism and contractarianism. The rise of the Prisoner's Dilemma is a distant result of the invention of game theory, one of the greatest intellectual advances in our understanding of social and political theory, by Neumann and Morgenstern nearly half a century ago. The fundamentally important strategic difference between the Prisoner's Dilemma and the state of nature is that the latter can be characterized neither as a single interaction nor even as a simple iterated interaction. To give Hobbes the greatest possible credit in his view of popular rule, note that it is clearly consistent with his general view of the rightness of a particular form of government.
