ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of natural justice in Leviathan. Beginning with a critique of natural justice and magnanimity in Aristotle and in Hobbes’s De Cive, and then turning to analyses of the relationship between natural justice and nomos, natural law, the command theory of law, and God’s law in Leviathan, I argue that Hobbes’s account of law routinely references the necessity for instantiated and eminent sovereign virtue. I argue that natural and positive law are conditioned by eminent sovereign virtue, and that although that condition may be latent during normal times, it is an essential condition for the practical realization of both in moments of emergency and crisis.
