ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explains that the Leviathan is haunted by the spectre of violent political disorder. The Leviathan also sidelines God. Hobbes numbered among his opponents not only old enemies who had fought with Parliament against Charles in the civil wars, but erstwhile friends such as Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon. The seeds of disorder are perpetual, and omnipresent, particularly in humans' tendency to back their own private judgements over the claims of the public authority. What matters is not whether Hobbes' theory can, at a stretch, be accommodated to conventional religious morality and theology. It is that the theory makes no demand that God play more than a walk-on part. Hobbes offers his theory of absolute sovereignty as a way of layi.
