In the previous two chapters I made the case for a new interpretation of Hobbes's right of self-defense and its corollaries, the true liberties of subjects. Together, these form a coherent doctrine of retained rights – cases wherein subjects retain the right to disobey or resist the commands of the sovereign. The relationship between Hobbes's theory of resistance rights and his claim that subjects authorize an absolute sovereign can now be examined. At first glance, it seems odd, or perhaps blatantly inconsistent, that a staunch absolutist such as Hobbes would be willing to allow such a broad spectrum of disobedience. As I noted in the Introduction, Jean Hampton famously argues that Hobbes's doctrine of retained rights is, in effect, the Achilles heel of his theory. Hampton's criticism of Hobbes focuses precisely on the supposed incompatibility between the rights he affords subjects, on the one hand, and his picture of, and justification for, absolute sovereignty, on the other. There is, thus, a genuine puzzle about how to understand the relationship between the conditional nature of Hobbes's account of political obligation and the unconditional, or absolute, nature of the Hobbesian sovereign. However, I argue in this chapter that this puzzle has a solution, and that Hobbes's political philosophy exhibits a unity and coherence that has heretofore been unrecognized.

While the rights of resistance are famously a problem for Hobbes because of their connection to the issue of rebellion, the conceptual problem about absolutism takes precedence.