I began this book by noting several puzzling features of Hobbes's account of legitimate political resistance. First, I noted that Hobbes allows for a much wider range of circumstances in which subjects are permitted to disobey the commands of their sovereign than the reader might expect. This peculiarity is compounded by the scarcity of identifiable arguments or explanations. Although he does give arguments – however weak they might be – for the right of self-defense, his account of the broader rights of resistance seems to amount to little more than an assortment of bare assertions and appeals to random examples. For instance, Hobbes simply asserts that subjects do not have to give incriminating testimony against those members of society with whom they have a certain relationship (spouse, benefactor, and unspecified people “whose loss would embitter one's life”); and in De Cive, for example, he builds a substantive discussion around a single example in which a subject is ordered to kill his own father, although this would presumably be an extremely rare occurrence. These claims seem even more confusing in light of the fact that Hobbes fails to distinguish between the inalienability of a certain right in any contract whatsoever and the inalienability of a right in the social contract in particular. As a result, he often gives the impression that he is arguing that there is no covenant at all in which one party can assume an obligation to submit to physical restraint or bodily injury, deadly or not – a claim that seems to invite immediate counterexample.