1. In Ao leitor sem medo, ch. 7, p. 221 of the third edition (Belo Horizonte, Editora UFMG, 2003), I have suggested that the third person of discourse is not only the person of whom one speaks, but rather the one of whom one speaks badly. This with reference to the passage in De cive (ch. I, para. 2) where Hobbes mentions people who are reluctant to leave the room in which they are conversing, afraid as they are of becoming the butt of slander the moment they depart! One might argue that I extend to the second person the courtesy of accepting him or treating him as an interlocutor, while the third person is not only absent but excluded from the conversation.

2. This paper has been previously discussed with several Brazilian colleagues. One participant suggested that the theft of tennis shoes would have the aim of selling them to get money for food or dope. I received the following e-mail from my then student Luis Felipe da Gama Pinto: ‘For five years I have been involved with an NGO which deals with boys and girls who have been removed from the streets; and one doesn't need much experience with them to appreciate the incredible symbolic importance of such sneakers, their potency as an object of desire. Contrarily to what one might expect, tennis shoes even justify the sacrifice of food; the ostentation of having them on one's feet is a goal with a power of seduction many times greater than that of food. Commonly, the bulk of one's money is derived from traffic or other robbery. The important thing about athletic shoes is to wear them.'

3. One need only cite Article 86, paragraph 4 of the Brazilian constitution of 1988, which prohibits law-suits against the President, during his term of office, for common crimes not related to the exercise of office — although it does authorize them once he has left office; or the court action in the United States in which President Clinton sought to interrupt a suit brought against him for an alleged crime against a person's honor, sustaining that as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces he should not be judged by a court other than the Senate while in office.

4. We should stress this point: Hobbesian theory is very clear in the identification between populus and sovereign — which means, the people are (or is) the sovereign, and it is this (republican or even democratic) principle that makes him accept democratic and aristocratic regimes when he comes to theorize politics; we should bear in mind that before his discovery of philosophy, when he was no more than a traditional humanist scholar, he translated Thucydides' History of the Grecian War meaning to show how democracies are inadequate and monarchies are superior to them when a war is at stake. This point, a major one in his preface to the Grecian War, disappears from — or rather, never appears in — his political philosophy. So, theoretically a Hobbesian democracy can be conceived of; it would not be very different, maybe, from Rousseau's regime in the Contrat social. But it is the mechanics of his system that makes a Hobbesian democracy or aristocracy almost unworkable, for the reasons exposed in this text.

5. And yet … To come back to the mechanics of Hobbes' system, the rulers' hybris is rendered unnecessary and counter-productive to their own interests, since they have everything to gain when they do not oppress their subjects. They are not forbidden to do that; it is again the mechanics that keeps the sovereign from being a despot. See esp. ch. 24 of Leviathan, when Hobbes discusses what we would call the economy of his State.

6. This expression is from Brazilian historian José Murilo de Carvalho.